SCI-FI/FANTASY SHARED WORLDS Reading & Signing

Meet six sci-fi/fantasy authors as they share their worlds! About the Authors!

Karen Lord has been a physics teacher, a diplomat, a
part-time soldier, and an academic at various times and in various countries.
She is now a writer and research consultant in Barbados. Her debut novel, Redemption
in Indigo, won the Frank Collymore Literary Award, the William L. Crawford
Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult Literature, and was nominated
for the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel. 

Robert V. S. Redick is the author of The Chathrand
Voyage series: The Red Wolf Conspiracy,one of SFX magazine’s top ten
science fiction and fantasy releases of 2008; The Ruling Sea,Fantasy Book
Critic’s number two fantasy of 2009; and The River of Shadows, a Locus
Recommended Read in 2011. A former international development researcher, Redick
worked most recently for the antipoverty organization Oxfam. He lives in
western Massachusetts.Will Hindmarch is a Chicago-based freelance writer and
designer with numerous professional credits as author, developer, producer, and
graphic designer on games, books, and magazines, some of them electronic. Will’s
writing has appeared in The Escapist, Atlanta magazine, Geek Monthly, Everywhere and
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. He was a judge for the MacArthur
Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning competition in 2007, 2010, and
2011. He is an instructor at Wofford
College’s Shared
Worlds writing and world-building camp. He co-produces the live-lit
storytelling show, Story Club South Side, too. 

Nathan Ballingrud was born in Massachusetts but has spent most of his life
in the South. He's worked as a bartender in New Orleans and a cook on offshore oil rigs.
His story "The Monsters of Heaven" won the inaugural Shirley Jackson
Award. He lives in Asheville,
NC, with his daughter.For the past 25 years, Hugo Award winner Ann VanderMeer and World Fantasy Award winner Jeff VanderMeer have been traveling into the past to bring back incredible stories for generations of readers. Their recent award-winning The Weird: A Compendium of Strange & Dark Stories (Corvus, UK) covered 100 years of weird fiction in a single massive 750,000-word, 1,200-page volume. The VanderMeers have also edited such iconic compilations as Steampunk and The New Weird, both considered definitive for those subgenres. Other recent books include The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities and The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals. This “literary power couple” (Boing Boing) has been profiled on national NPR, the Weather Channel, Wired.com, and the New York Times’ book blog. Together or separately, they have been keynote speakers around the world, including at MIT, the Library of Congress, and Utopiales. They also have been brought in to conduct creativity workshops for the likes of Blizzard Entertainment (World of Warcraft) and help run Wofford College’s Shared Worlds, a unique SF/Fantasy teen writing camp. Ann served as editor-in-chief of Weird Tales for five years and is an acquiring editor for Tor.com. Jeff’s most recent novels, The Southern Reach series, were acquired by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and optioned for film by Paramount Pictures. He writes book reviews for the Guardian, Los Angeles Times, New York Times Book Review, and many others. They live in Tallahassee, Florida, with four cats and ten thousand books.