Guests of Honor

Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire photo

Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works, both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn’t enough, she also writes under the pseudonym “Mira Grant.” For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.

In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music. She is also a cartoonist and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, “With Friends Like These…,” as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words “blood,” “night,” “terror,” or “attack” in the title. Most people believe she doesn’t sleep.

Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.

Web site: http://seananmcguire.com/

Artist Guest of Honor: Alyssa Winans

Alyssa Winans art (tree and white unicorn)

Alyssa is an illustrator, animator, and game artist based in the San Francisco bay area. She currently works for the Google Doodle team and enjoys making pastries and unusual ice cream flavors on the weekends.

Website: http://www.alyssawinans.com

Music Guests of Honor: Margaret & Kristoph

Margaret and Kristoph (with harp and guitar)

SUGO MUSIC recording artists Margaret Davis and Kristoph Klover perform original arrangements of Celtic music from the British Isles and the Medieval and Renaissance melodies of the European courts and countrysides. Featuring soaring vocals and Celtic harp, guitar, octave mandolin, flute, recorders, and whistle. They have delighted audiences since 1993 — sharing the magic of other times and places with fans of traditional music the world over. Through their travels and studies, Margaret & Kristoph have put together an engaging collection of traditional Celtic, Medieval, and Renaissance music ranging from haunting harp-based ballads and troubadour love songs to danceable jigs and reels. Their lyrics, including some in Gaelic, Medieval French, and Provençal, speak of love and longing, quests and revels, magic and transformation in a language that transports and enchants the listener. 

They have recorded 15 CDs on the Flowinglass Music label, as the duo and with their bands Avalon Rising and Brocelïande, and in 2008 they performed in the Disney movie Bedtime Stories. In 2018 they won the Lost Chord Award, presented by the Society for Ritual Arts for their many years of creating and supporting mythopoetic music, folk music, Early music, Pagan music, harpers of the Bay Area, and the Celtic Rock communities, through community engagement, recording, and the establishment of Flowinglass Music.

Website: https://flowinglass.com

Fan Guests of Honor: Bruce & Cheryl Evry

Bruce and Cheryl Evry as Cartoon Martians

In the lore of local fandom, one cannot pass the DC area without hearing about the convention running duo of Bruce and Chryl Evry. Bruce started a small gaming supply group called Fantasy Teknicks, or FanTek for short, around 1981 out of Aberdeen, MD. A birthday party he planned “for his closest friends” in 1982 quickly grew out of hand, and he had to move it to a hotel over New Year’s Eve.  Thus, Evecon was born. Around Evecon 3, he met a young woman from Philadelphia, Cheryl. Together, they became a formidable team running the conventions, which expanded to include CastleCon in 1987. These quickly grew, and FanTek joined the ranks of DC fandom. Later, they went on to try out other experiments, like HalloweenCon and CthulhuCon, usually as one-off ideas, out of Frederick, MD.

But FanTek cons, which were affectionately called “BruceCons” by some, were more than just fan-run events.  For starters, after EveCon 4, they no longer had headline guests.  Oh, they had famous people, including Issac Asimov, but Bruce said “all my friends are my guests,” meaning the convention attendees as well. This radical plan became one of the first “relaxacons” in the area, where the convention was focused more on social aspects of fandom, rather than the fuss of guests. Local writers and celebrities hung out in the relaxed environment. Programming took chances: they had “ordinary people” talk about things they liked rather than depending on star power.  This gave an enormous boost to the local fandom community before the Internet.  Some critics called FanTek cons “aloof,” and “not serious conventions,” but Bruce would reply, “well, yeah.  That’s the point.”  Many, many people started out entire careers from cosplay to literary pursuits, from technology to research jobs, all too numerous to mention, from these conventions. Membership to Fantek never went beyond 2500 people, but lasted an amazing 21 years until their last CastleCon in 2003 when they announced their retirement.

Those who didn’t know DC fandom before the huge media conventions don’t know how important these smaller cons were to local DC fandom.  It gave us a chance to be ourselves, whether were nerds, geeks, transgendered, furry, weeaboos, goth, gay, or somewhere on the autism sepctrum.  FanTek cons were our home and family, always guests to Bruce and Cheryl.

2021 Heinlein Award Winner: C. J. Cherryh

C J Cherryh

C. J. Cherryh is a speculative fiction writer, editor, and translator. She is best known for the Alliance-Union Universe, the Foreigner Universe, and the Fortress series. She won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 1977 and several Hugo Awards including Best Novel for Downbelow Station (1981) and Cyteen (1988). She has a Master of Arts in classics from Johns Hopkins University. Ms. Cherryh taught high school Latin, Ancient Greek, the classics, and ancient history. She enjoys figure skating and has an interest in genealogy, history, and archaeology. She lives in Spokane, Washington, USA. Her current project, with Jane S. Fancher, is working on a sequel to their 2019 novel Alliance Rising set in the Alliance–Union universe.  

Website: https://cherryh.com/ 

2019 Compton Crook Award Winner: R. F. Kuang

RF Kuang author photo

Rebecca F. Kuang is the Astounding Award-winning and Nebula, Locus, and World Fantasy Award nominated author of The Poppy War and The Dragon Republic (Harper Voyager). Her debut novel The Poppy War won the Crawford Award and the 2019 Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. She has an MPhil in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge and is currently pursuing an MSc in Contemporary Chinese Studies at Oxford University on a Marshall Scholarship. She also translates Chinese science fiction to English. She starts her PhD in East Asian Languages and Literatures at Yale next fall.

Website: https://rfkuang.com/

2020 Compton Crook Award Winner: Arkady Martine

Arkady Martine publicity photo

Arkady Martine is speculative fiction writer and, as Dr. AnnaLinden Weller, a historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She is currently a policy advisor for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals, and Natural Resources Department, where she works on climate change mitigation, energy grid modernization, and resiliency planning. Under both her names she writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda, and the edges of the world. Her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, won the 2020 Hugo Award for Best Novel and the 2020 Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel. Arkady grew up in New York City and, after some time in Turkey, Canada, Sweden, and Baltimore, lives in Santa Fe with her wife, the author Vivian Shaw.

Website: arkadymartine.net

2021 Compton Crook Award Winner: Micaiah Johnson

Micaiah Johnson photo

Micaiah Johnson was raised in California’s Mojave Desert surrounded by trees named Joshua and women who told stories.

She received her bachelor of arts in creative writing from the University of California, Riverside, and her master of fine arts in fiction from Rutgers University–Camden. She now studies American literature at Vanderbilt University, where she focuses on critical race theory and automatons.

Her debut novel, The Space Between Worlds, from Hodder in the UK and Crown in the US, is a science-fiction novel that uses the concept of the multiverse to examine privilege.