Guest of Honor

Sarah Pinsker is the author of the novelette "In Joy, Knowing the Abyss Behind," the 2014 Sturgeon Award winner and a 2013 Nebula finalist. Her story "A Stretch of Highway Two Lanes Wide" was a 2014 Nebula finalist, and another story, "No Lonely Seafarer," made the 2014 Tiptree Award longlist. Her fiction has been published in magazines including Asimov's, Strange Horizons, Lightspeed (including the Women Destroy Science Fiction and Queers Destroy Science Fiction special issues), Fantasy & Science Fiction, Uncanny, Daily Science Fiction, the Journal of Unlikely Cartography, and Fireside, and in anthologies including Accessing the Future: A Disability Themed Anthology of Speculative Fiction, How to Live On Other Planets: A Handbook for Aspiring Aliens, Long Hidden, Fierce Family, and The Future Embodied. Her stories have been translated into Chinese, Spanish, and Galician. She co-hosts the Baltimore Science Fiction Society's Dangerous Voices Variety Hour, a reading series/quiz show. She is also a singer/songwriter with three albums on various independent labels: (Charmed, disappear records; Wingspan, Reinventing Records; This is Your Signal, The Beechfields, with the Stalking Horses) and a fourth forthcoming. She and her wife live in Baltimore, Maryland and she can be found online at sarahpinsker.com and twitter.com/sarahpinsker.

Art Guest of Honor

Tabitha Ladin grew up in Maine and began her life as an artist at a very early age. From her early years she has loved drawing and painting animals both real and imagined. She still has drawings done when she was four years old that she occasionally pulls out for giggles.

Tabitha went to The Art Center of Tucson in Arizona to learn Graphic Design and Computer Graphic Design. After some freelance work, she moved to the Los Angeles area in California and worked as a colorist and later a color editor for Malibu Comics. After about a year she moved back to Arizona and worked as an interface designer for a major financial software company and later joined the marketing department to create designs for catalogues, brochures, flyers, packaging etc. She worked there for about eight years before her position was eliminated and she decided to care for her children full time.

In 2009 when her children weren’t so little Tabitha decided to return to her true passion; fantasy and nature art. Working in acrylic paints she strives to bring to life in brilliant color all the fantastic creatures that reside in her imagination. She sends her fantasy and science fiction art to various fantasy and science fiction convention art shows around the country. She has also published a line of 6 fantasy themed coloring books on Amazon.com.

Tabitha can be found online at http://www.tabithaLadin.com.

Music Guest of Honor

S. J. Tucker came flying out of the Memphis music scene in 2004, guitar in hand and voice at the ready, and her feet have hardly hit the ground since. With a siren’s voice and a mental blowtorch made of masterful lyrical storytelling and style, she deftly binds together the varied elements of jazz, folk, and fairytales. No two of her concerts are the same, but S. J.'s skill, stage presence and desire for connection with her audience, consistently shine through. Listeners and critics compare her guitar work to that of Emily Saliers, her vocal delivery to KT Tunstall and Joni Mitchell. The body of her recorded work spans more than ten years and features frequent guest performances by Heather Dale, Betsy Tinney, Ben Deschamps, Alexander James Adams, and Renee Janski. S. J. often travels solo, but is happiest when sharing concerts with her 3-piece folk fusion band, Tricky Pixie. She’ll be on the road in 2016, as ever, but when she isn’t traveling, she lives with a very handsome wizard and three equally handsome cats, in a thoroughly enchanted forest, at the feet of the Arkansas Ozarks. Listen for free and join the fan family at http://sjtucker.com

Special Guests

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