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Melinda M. Snodgrass was born in Los Angeles California, but the family moved to New Mexico when she was five months old. Under her father’s tutelage she was given every possible opportunity — she learned to ride, shoot, swim and fly fish, She sat in on his business meetings and traveled with him from a young age.
She inherited her father’s musical ability and studied ballet, voice and piano. She starred with the Civic Light Opera, and performed the role of Gretel with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra Hansel and Gretel. Her love of music took her to Vienna Austria where she studied voice at the Conservatorium der Stadt Wien.
She soon realized that while she had a good voice she didn’t have an extraordinary voice, and she returned to America to finish her college degrees, majoring in History (Magna Cum Laude) and minoring in music. Upon graduation, she entered the New Mexico School of Law.
After graduation she practiced law for three years working first for Sandia National Laboratories, and then a corporate law firm. She quickly discovered that while she loved the law, she wasn’t terribly fond of lawyers. At the urging of Victor Milan, she tried writing and never looked back.
Melinda M. Snodgrass has written a number of books and scripts for television. In 1984 she and George R.R. Martin developed the Wild Card Series, a shared world mosaic series with a focus on the real impact of superheroes in our world. The series is 28 books strong, was nominated for a Hugo award.
For Hollywood Melinda Snodgrass wrote a spec script for Star Trek: The Next Generation. The script, The Measure of a Man, was nominated for the Writer’s Guild Award for outstanding writing in a drama series and has been shown in the museum of computer science and artificial intelligence in Paris France. It has also been voted as one of the ten best Star Trek episodes from all series. She worked on Reasonable Doubts and the Profiler, written episodes for The Antagonists, Sliders, Strange Luck, Odyssey 5, to name only a few. She also scripted an adaptation of Star Blazers for Disney.
Jody Lynn Nye lists her main career activity as “spoiling cats.” A native Chicagoan, Jody is a New York Times bestselling author of more than fifty books and 170 short stories. As a part of Bill Fawcett & Associates (she is the ‘& Associates’), she has helped to edit more than two hundred books, including forty anthologies, with a few under her own name. Her work tends toward the humorous side of SF and fantasy. Along with her individual work, Jody has collaborated with several notable professionals in the field, including Anne McCaffrey, Robert Asprin, John Ringo, and Piers Anthony. She collaborated with Robert Asprin on a number of his famous Myth-Adventures series, and has continued both that and his Dragons Wild series since his death in 2008. Her latest books are Rhythm of the Imperium (Baen), Moon Tracks (with Travis S. Taylor, Baen), Myth-Fits (Ace), and Once More, with Feeling, a short book on revising manuscripts (WordFire).
Jody runs the two-day intensive writers’ workshop at DragonCon, every Labor Day weekend in Atlanta, GA. She is also a judge for the Writers of the Future contest, the largest speculative fiction contest in the world.
Jody lives in the northwest suburbs of Atlanta, with her husband Bill Fawcett, a writer, game designer, military historian and book packager, and three feline overlords, Athena, Minx, and Marmalade. Check out her website mythadventures.net or find her on social media.
Phil Foglio is a multiple Hugo award winning author and artist with works for Dragon Magazine, Robert Asprin’s Myth Adventures number of miniseries for DC Comics (including a well-received revival of Stanley and His Monster), and the Adventures of Buck Godot. He's also done artwork for a number of Magic: The Gathering and Munchkin cards, Spiderweb Software's Nethergate and Avernum 1-3. He and his wife Kaja are the co-creators of the Girl Genius graphic and prose books and have been the winner of the Graphic Story Hugo Award for three years running (2009-2011). They actually removed themselves from the running in 2012 because they wanted to give others a chance to win.
Bill Fawcett
After writing for the early issues of Dragon Magazine in the 1970s Bill became one of the founders of and lead designer at Mayfair Games. He has continued his board and electronic game design work. Bill Fawcett & Associates has packaged over 400 books science fiction, fantasy, military, non-fiction, and licensed books for major publishers.
As an author Bill has written or co-authored over a dozen books plus close to one hundred articles and short stories. Bill collaborated on several mystery novels with Chelsea Quinn Yarbro including the Authorized Mycroft Holmes novels. He edited two oral histories of the Navy SEALs. As an anthologist Bill has edited or co-edited over 40 science fiction anthologies.
Harry Turtledove
Harry Turtledove is the award-winning author of the alternate-history works The Man with the Iron Heart, The Guns of the South, and How Few Remain (winner of the Sidewise Award for Best Novel); the Hot War books: Bombs Away, Fallout, and Armistice; the War That Came Early novels: Hitler’s War, West and East, The Big Switch, Coup d’Etat, Two Fronts, and Last Orders; the Worldwar saga: In the Balance, Tilting the Balance, Upsetting the Balance, and Striking the Balance; the Colonization books: Second Contact, Down to Earth, and Aftershocks; the Great War epics: American Front, Walk in Hell, and Breakthroughs; the American Empire novels: Blood and Iron, The Center Cannot Hold, and Victorious Opposition; and the Settling Accounts series: Return Engagement, Drive to the East, The Grapple, and In at the Death.
As the "The Master of Alternate History" Harry Turtledove has been being some of the greatest “What-if’s” of fiction.
Turtledove is married to fellow novelist Laura Frankos. They have three daughters—Alison, Rachel, and Rebecca—and two granddaughters, Cordelia Turtledove Katayanagi and Phoebe Quinn Turtledove Katayanagi.
Rick Heinz is the product of an amazing imagination and far too many hours playing Diablo. In addition to writing novels he is also a leading contributor for the award winning web magazine Geek & Sundry on both gaming and storytelling.
He is often a featured quest on pop culture events across the country for his work in teaching storytelling to kids through gaming and RPGs.
New York Times bestselling author Dan Wells is best known for his horror series I AM NOT A SERIAL KILLER, of which the first book is now an award-winning movie through IFC Midnight. His most recent work is ZERO G, an audible-only best-selling middle grade science fiction novel.
His other novels include THE HOLLOW CITY, EXTREME MAKEOVER, and two science fiction series: PARTIALS and MIRADOR. He cohosts the Hugo-winning podcast for aspiring writers called Writing Excuses. Dan lives in Utah with his wife, 6 children, and more than 400 board games.
Quin
A professional writer for more than forty years, Yarbro has sold over eighty books, more than seventy works of short fiction, and more than three dozen essays, introductions, and reviews. She also composes serious music. Her first professional writing - in 1961-1962 - was as a playwright for a now long-defunct children's theater company. By the mid-60s she had switched to writing stories and hasn't stopped yet.
After leaving college in 1963 and until she became a full-time writer in 1970, she worked as a demographic cartographer, and still often drafts maps for her books, and occasionally for the books of other writers.
She has a large reference library with books on a wide range of subjects, everything from food and fashion to weapons and trade routes to religion and law. She is constantly adding to it as part of her on-going fascination with history and culture; she reads incessantly, searching for interesting people and places that might provide fodder for stories.
In 1997 the Transylvanian Society of Dracula bestowed a literary knighthood on Yarbro, and in 2003 the World Horror Association presented her with a Grand Master award. In 2006 the International Horror Guild enrolled her among their Living Legends, the first woman to be so honored; the Horror Writers Association gave her a Life Achievement Award in 2009. In 2014 she won a Life Achievement Award from the World Fantasy Convention.
A skeptical occultist for forty years, she has studied everything from alchemy to zoomancy, and in the late 1970s worked occasionally as a professional tarot card reader and palmist at the Magic Cellar in San Francisco.
She has two domestic accomplishments: she is a good cook and an experienced seamstress. The rest is catch-as-catch-can.
Divorced, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area - with two cats: the irrepressible Butterscotch and Crumpet, the Gang of Two. When not busy writing, she enjoys the symphony or opera.
Brian D. Anderson
BRIAN D. ANDERSON is the bestselling fantasy author of The Godling Chronicles, Dragonvein, and Akiri (with co-author Steven Savile) series.
His books have sold more than 500,000 copies worldwide and his audiobooks are perennially popular. After a fifteen year long career in music, he rediscovered his boyhood love of writing. It was soon apparent that this was what he should have been pursuing all along. Currently, he lives in the sleepy southern town of Fairhope, Alabama with his wife and son, who inspire him daily.
Travis Richey
Travis Richey is an actor/writer living in Hollywood, CA. He has recently appeared on TV in FOX's Sons of Tucson, NBC's The Event, and Lifetime's Seriously Funny Kids.
He is also recurring on ABC Family's "Pretty Little Liars" as Harold Crane, and on NBC's "Community" as Inspector Spacetime, a role that launched him into the spotlight of Doctor Who fans.
Travis had previously achieved international acclaim as the creator of several web series, including "Robot, Ninja & Gay Guy", "2 Hot Guys In The Shower", "Smiley Town", and an award-winning series of "Mac vs PC" spoofs.
His videos have been seen on CNN, Comedy Central's website, The Huffington Post, The UK Telegraph, PerezHilton.com, and dozens of other notable blogs and websites across the internet, and have garnered over 3 million views. Travis also performs regularly at ACME Comedy Hollywood.
Nelson McKeeby
Nelson McKeeby is an Iowa born autistic author who is proud that one of his great uncles posed for American Gothic, and another died serving as the police chief of Des Moines. A life-long Quaker, Nelson spent most of his life pursuing his hobbies of organic gardening, hitch hiking, and listening to local folk-stories through out Mexico and Europe. He has walked the length of the Appalachian trail and spent a year as an itinerant laborer living in home made shelters.
When forced to earn a living he has held a range of mundane day jobs including acting as the senior director for the Home Shopping Network, as a senior producer for the United States Department of Justice office of legal education, serving as a consultant for the film and television industry, as a technologist and fund raiser for the Music Path, as a deputy sheriff, and served as a technology coordinator for Internet development of several museum projects. He is an award winning educator whose has fought, usually without success, to make higher education a friendly place for nuerodiversity.