Our Guests
Tad Williams
Tad Williams is a California-based fantasy superstar. His genre-creating (and genre-busting) books have sold tens of millions worldwide, in twenty-five languages. His considerable output of epic fantasy and science fiction book-series, stories of all kinds, urban fantasy novels, comics, scripts, etc., have strongly influenced a generation of writers.
Williams’s work in comics includes a six issue mini-series for DC called The Next. He also wrote Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis issue #50 to #57. Other comic work includes Mirrorworld: Rain and The Helmet of Fate: Ibis the Invincible #1 (DC).
Williams is collaborating on a series of young-adult books with his wife, Deborah Beale, called The Ordinary Farm Adventures. The first two books in the series are The Dragons of Ordinary Farm and The Secrets of Ordinary Farm.
Tad is currently immersed in the creation of The Last King of Osten Ard, planned as a trilogy bookended by two shorter novels. He, his family and his animals live in the Santa Cruz mountains in a suitably strange and beautiful house. @tadwilliams @mrstad
Reiko Murakami
Reiko Murakami is a U.S. based concept artist and illustrator specializing in surreal fantasy art. With her expressive gesture drawings she focuses on capturing moments filled with unspeakable emotions. In 2013 she started a series called Resonance, a project that depicts complex emotional reactions through metaphorical representation of a figure.
Her work has been exhibited at Nucleus Portland, Krabjab Studio, Light Grey Art Lab and published in Spectrum, Infected by Art, ArtOrder Invitational: The Journal, Exposé, 2D Artist, and many others.
Visit her website at: reikomurakami.com
Sheree Renée Thomas
Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning fiction writer, poet, and editor. Her work is inspired by myth and folklore, natural science and conjure, her roots in Memphis, and in the genius culture created in the Mississippi Delta. Sheree’s stories and poetry explore ordinary people facing extraordinary circumstances. She is the author of Sleeping Under the Tree of Life (Aqueduct Press), honored with a Publishers Weekly Starred Review and longlisted for the 2016 James Tiptree, Jr. Award, and of Shotgun Lullabies (2011), described as “a revelatory work like Jean Toomer’s Cane.” Thomas edited the two Dark Matter (Hachette) black speculative fiction volumes that first introduced W. E. B. Du Bois’s work as science fiction, winning two World Fantasy Awards (2001, 2005).
Her work appears in numerous anthologies and literary journals, including Sycorax’s Daughters, Do Not Go Quietly, So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy, Memphis Noir, Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks, Afrofuturo(s), Ghost Fishing: Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology, The Ringing Ear, Apex Magazine, FIYAH Magazine, Callaloo, Fireside Quarterly, African Voices, Jalada, Strange Horizons, Blacktasticon, Mojo Rising: Contemporary Writers, Mojo: Conjure Stories, Stories for Chip: Tribute to Samuel R. Delany, 80! Memories and Reflections On Ursula K. Le Guin, and Harvard’s Transition.
She is the Associate Editor of Obsidian: Literature & Arts in the African Diaspora (Illinois State University, Normal), the Founding Editor of MOJO: Journal of the Black Speculative Arts Movement, and the co-editor of Trouble the Waters: Tales of the Deep Blue (Rosarium). Honored with fellowships from Breadloaf Environmental, the Millay Colony of Arts, Smith College, the New York Foundation of the Arts, VCCA, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Tennessee Arts Commission among others, Thomas’s multigenre writing explores the hidden wonders in the invisible. Her stories have received Notable Mention in the Year’s Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Honorable Mention in several volumes of the Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror. Her editorial work uncovered a legacy of over a century of black science fiction writing and helped launch the careers of some of the most exciting new voices in the field.
Look for her first all-fiction collection, Nine Bar Blues, forthcoming from Third Man Books in 2020. Visit her on Twitter @blackpotmojo Facebook/Instagram @shereereneethomas
Margo Lanagan
Margo Lanagan has been publishing fiction for nearly thirty years. After an apprenticeship in teen romance, junior fiction-with-a-dash-of-fantasy and gritty-realist YA, she completed her move into fantasy writing by attending the Clarion West workshop in 1999. The stories she wrote there formed much of her first collection, White Time. But it was her second, Black Juice, containing the story “Singing My Sister Down”, that attracted wide attention. It won a Victorian Premier’s Award, two Aurealis and two Ditmar awards, two World Fantasy Awards (for Best Short Story and Best Collection), was a Michael L Printz Honor Book and made the Tiptree honor list, and was shortlisted in two other premier’s awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Stoker, International Horror Guild and Seiun awards.
Further collections followed; Red Spikes, Yellowcake, Cracklescape, and two mostly-reprints compilations, Singing My Sister Down and Other Stories, and Phantom Limbs. Margo’s World Fantasy Award-winning novel Tender Morsels, a reworking of the Grimm brothers’ “Snow White and Rose Red”, came out in 2008.
She published a novella about selkies, “Sea Hearts”, in Coeur de Lion’s X6 novellanthology in 2009, which won her a fourth World Fantasy Award. She later developed the story into the novel Sea Hearts, published as The Brides of Rollrock Island in the US and the UK. From 2015 to 2018 she published, in collaboration with Scott Westerfeld and Deborah Biancotti, the New York Times-bestselling YA fantasy action adventure series Zeroes (Zeroes, Swarm, and Nexus).
Margo’s short stories have been widely anthologized and her work has been translated into sixteen languages. She has served on several significant Australian book award judging panels, and on the Literature Board of the Australia Council for the Arts. And she has taught extensively, including three times at the Clarion South workshop, twice at Clarion West and once at Clarion UCSD. Margo lives in Sydney, Australia.
Beth Meacham
Beth has been a science fiction and fantasy editor for more than 30 years. She has worked for Ace Books, Berkeley, and Tor, where she was editor in chief from 1985 through 1989. She now works as an Executive Editor for Tor, from her home in Arizona.
Among the authors Beth has worked with are Piers Anthony, Orson Scott Card, Cecelia Holland, Jay Lake, Elizabeth Bear, Pat Murphy, Sarah Monette, Ken Scholes, Will Shetterly, John M. Ford, Michael Cassutt, Pat Murphy, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, Tim Powers, Mike Brotherton, William Gibson, David Brin, Pat Cadigan, Storm Constantine, Lisa Goldstein, Steven Gould, Randy Henderson, Nancy Kress, Melanie Rawn, Charles Sheffield, Judith Tarr, Jack Vance, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro and Jane Yolen.
Click Here for a list of Selected Titles Edited by Beth Meacham
Robert Silverberg: Toastmaster
Robert has been a professional writer since 1955, widely known for his science fiction and fantasy stories. He is a many-time winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards, was named to the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 1999, and in 2004 was designated as a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America.
His books and stories have been translated into forty languages. Among his best known titles are Nightwings, Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, and the three volumes of the Majipoor Cycle: Lord Valentine’s Castle, Majipoor Chronicles, and Valentine Pontifex. His collected short stories, covering nearly sixty years of work, have been published in nine volumes by Subterranean Press. His most recent book is Tales of Majipoor (2013), a new collection of stories set on the giant world made famous in Lord Valentine’s Castle.
He and his wife Karen and an assorted population of cats live in the San Francisco Bay Area in a sprawling house surrounded by exotic plants.