Program Participant Biographies, Continued

Richard Foss

Richard Foss is a journalist, culinary historian, editor, book reviewer, and science fiction writer based in Manhattan Beach, California. He is a regular contributor to several Los Angeles area newspapers and magazines, and freelances for national and international publications. A current Board Member of the Culinary Historians of Southern California, he is teaching culinary anthropology at UCLA Extension and occasionally lectures on Elizabethan theater history. He has been active in science fiction fandom for over thirty years, and his first published SF story appeared in Analog in 2002. Several more have followed in that magazine and various short story anthologies, and two ("Madman's Bargain" and "To Leap The Highest Wall") will appear in Analog this year.

Among other jobs, Richard has been a travel agent, operations manager for a hotel, theater director, photographer, and booking agent for a traditional music concert series. In addition to journalistic and fiction writing, he does publication consulting to culinary businesses. He met his wife at a science fiction convention, and their two children are souvenirs of Worldcons. Both are avid fans, though at this point devoted to more stable careers than writing for a living.
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Samantha Henderson

Samantha Henderson was born in Oxford, England and moved to South Africa, Illinois, and Oregon before settling in the wilds of Covina, California, where she works as a church secretary and where family and associates alike tolerate her weird writing habits.

Her short fiction and poetry had appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Strange Horizons, Chizine, Lone Star Stories, Helix, Fantasy, Escape Pod, Goblin Fruit, Ideomancer, Star*Line, Dreams and Nightmares and others, and her first novel, Heaven's Bones, will be released in September 2008 by Wizards of the Coast. She is an active member and treasurer of the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and an alumnus of the Launchpad Workshop.
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Scott Humphries

Scott has been a reader of all genres of fiction for over 34 years, and a fan for longer than that. Scott graduated from Florida State University with a B/A in English (creative writing). For the past 20 years, Scott worked in the IT field as a technical writer and/or a technical trainer. Companies include State of Florida, EDS, NCR, AT&T, and IBM.

He was a Mainstream and Science Fiction editor for over four years with www.writershood.com (a multi genre website offering free short stories and novels). He was an editorial judge for the Dream Awards 2005.

As a freelance editor, he has edited dozens of novels, some of which have been submitted and published with various small presses. Some have also been self published (per the authors' personal direction). You can learn more about Scott at his website. He is currently Science Fiction editor at Flying Pen Press an independent publisher based in Denver, Colorado.
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Stephen Boucher

Stephen Boucher atttended his first Australian Natcon in 1982, and since 1990 has usually managed to attend at least a couple of overseas conventions as well as Worldcon every year.

He's been on the con committees of numerous Australian National SF Conventions and was a Board Member and Facilities Division Head at Aussiecon 3 (the Worldcon in 1999). He's also worked on several Worldcons, mostly in the Facilities area. He was the Fan Guest of Honor at Concave 21.

Stephen is a long-standing member of the WSFS Mark Protection Committee. He lives in Melbourne, Australia.
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Susan Fichtelberg

Susan Fichtelberg was born in Manhattan and raised across the river in New Jersey. At the age of twelve she read The Lord of the Rings and fell under the life-long spell of fantasy.

She majored in writing and elementary education in collage and went on to graduate school to earn a Masters of Library Science at Rutgers University. She is a children's librarian and the author of Encountering Enchantment: A Guide to Speculative Fiction for Teens, published by Libraries Unlimited in December of 2006. She also co-authored the book, Tamora Pierce with friend and colleague Bonnie Kunzel. It is part of the Greenwood Press Teen Reads series.

She has presented programs on fantasy literature for local and national school and library associations. She is currently working her next book, Junior Genereflecting with co-author Bridget Vogt, as well as on various fiction projects.

In her spare time, Susan likes to create jewelry, attend figure skating events and hockey games, travel, take pictures, and, of course, read.

Visit her website.

"The works of J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Lloyd Alexander ushered me into worlds of wonder, and I love guiding young people to those worlds and many others. I think fantasy and science fiction push the boundaries of imaginative exploration and experience beyond that which is known into that which is possible,freeing the mind to roam unfettered by reality.";

Susan Fichtelberg
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Tanya Huff

Tanya Huff was born in the Canadian Maritimes, specifically Halifax, Nova Scotia. Although she hasn't lived there since she was three, she still considers herself a Maritimer. After serving in the Canadian Naval Reserve, she got a degree in Radio and Television Arts from Ryerson Polytechnic Institute (Robert Sawyer was a classmate) and then, when she graduated, sold sunglasses from a pushcart on the streets of Toronto. It was a bad year for RTA grads… She wrote her first two books on a Commodore 64 back in the mid 1980s and very much misses Paperclip, that first word processing program.

She considers herself to be primarily a storyteller, something she's been doing one way or another for most of her life. Not including two poems she sold to the local paper when she was ten, her first professional sale was in 1986. To date, she's published twenty-four books, sixty-four short stories, a couple dozen book reviews, four pop culture essays, and one screen play.

Huff recently award outstanding canadian contribution to or 2007 . given out yearly at polaris, regional convention once known toronto trek, constellation awards are canada s annual awards, focused rewarding excellence in science fiction film television. huff won work as writer of source material and creative consultant for blood ties, the television series based on her five vicki nelson books.

Valor's Trial, the fourth in the Torin Kerr Space Marine books, came out in hardcover from DAW in June 2008, simultaneously with Heart of Valor, the third book, in paperback, also from DAW. She's currently working on an as yet untitled, stand-alone Urban Fantasy, set in Calgary, Alberta, which will come out sometime in 2009.

In her non-writing life, she used to ride Hunter Jumping, fence, and play D&D with probability chits instead of dice before it was AD&D. She was once a journeyman costumer, though she hasn't competed in twenty years. She's married to Fiona Patton, the author of the Branian Books and the Warriors of Estavia series from DAW and they live more or less equitably with seven cats and an incontinent Chihuahua.
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Tony Ruggiero

Tony Ruggiero retired from the United States Navy in 2001 after twenty-three years of service. While continuing to write, Tony teaches at Old Dominion University, Saint Leo University, and Tidewater Community College in Norfolk, Virginia.

His published novels include:

Operation Immortal Servitude: Book I of the Declassified Files of the Team of Darkness: The US military has developed a new weapon to be added to its arsenal—the creatures known as vampires. Tony uses his Naval experience to write this dark fantasy thriller about a group of vampires that are discovered in Kosovo, captured and brought back to the United States to be used by the Navy SEALs as an elite hit squad. Ground breaking and fast paced , the novel is a characteristic mixture of the vampire lore of Anne Rice and the clandestine secrets of the military found in Tom Clancy novels.

Operation Save the Innocent: Book II of the Declassified files of the Team of Darkness: General Stone, the commander of the Special Operations forces is murdered. His assassin is a vampire who has been controlled and used by a U.S. secret government organization to murder selected targets since her arrival in the United States over sixty years ago. Meanwhile, the vampires from the Team of Darkness operation discover the existence of two young vampire girls being held captive in their own former prison and set out to free them while eluding both the military and the Agency.

Alien Deception: Something to keep in mind with the upcoming presidential election: Nothing is as it appears…nothing. Your whole life you think you understand who and what you are and then one day you learn that it is all a lie. So what do you do? You have lunch with the leading candidate for President of the United States…you and your alien friends.

Alien Revelation: Death has many meanings. For some it is an end, while for others it is a beginning. Yet, for one human/alien hybrid, it is a way to have one final chance to try and save his home, Earth, a son he has never seen, and find an enemy that just won't stay dead. The exciting conclusion to Alien Deception.

Tony is also a contributing author to The Fantasy Writers' Companion from Dragon Moon Press. The Companion picks up where The Complete Guide to Writing Fantasy leaves off. Tony's contribution is a chapter on the effective use of horror in fantasy.

Other collaborative work includes the anthologies The Writers for Relief,No Longer Dreams and Breach the Hull. In addition, Tony has a humorous tale called, The Importance of Undergarments & Science Fiction Conventions, which will be appearing in the Writers For Relief Anthology II coming in Fall 2008.

Coming in 2009 from Dragon Moon Press, the third book in his vampire series: Operation Face the Fear: From the Declassified Files of the Team of Darkness.

For more information, please visit his website.
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Uncle River

Uncle River grew up among Boston intellectuals, earned a Ph.D. in Psychology of the Unconscious, and trained with Jungian Analysts. Then, the direction he thought his life was going turned to silly putty, leaving him the default to follow his dreams, literally, to Catron County, New Mexico — a county the same size as the state he grew up in, with a population the same size as the student body of the high school he attended.

River spent most of the next thirty years as a hermit-writer, in remote river canyons, caretaking and such for a place to live and grow a garden. Two years ago, he moved up to Pie Town, at 7,800 ft., on the Continental Divide — the ends of the Earth to many, but for River, a move to town. There, he has become much involved with the Volunteer Fire Department and EMS, interesting indeed where fire calls often are 20 miles off…and off pavement, ambulance runs 80 miles to the nearest hospital, and a majority of those responding are over 60.

Places where River's short fiction has appeared include Asimov's, Analog, Amazing Stories, Interzone, Talebones, Tales of The Unanticipated, Tales of The Talisman, Science Fiction Trails, Albedo One, and a Hartwell/Cramer Year's Best Fantasy anthology.

River's Mogollon News — fictitious news set in one of the West's classic real ghost towns, where River lived for five years, originally a regional newspaper and Public Radio feature, later was a feature in the British Speculative Fiction periodical BBR. The complete collected Mogollon News is just out from LBF Books. Mogollon News editor David Lee Summers, of Hadrosaur Productions, also is editor of the Flying Pen Press Space Pirates anthology, to debut at Denvention, which includes an Uncle River story.

The second edition of River's Prometheus: the autobiography is just out from Crossquarter Publishing Group. Forthcoming, from PS Publishing, are a novella: Camp Desolation And An Eschatology of Salt, and a collection of River's stories that have appeared in SF/F publications: Counting Tadpoles.
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Ann Chamberlin

Ann Chamberlin is the international bestselling author of ten historical and historical/fantasy novels. Her trilogy set in sixteenth-century Turkey was on the Turkish bestseller list for a year. The Merlin of St. Gilles' Well was one of Booklist's 10 Best Fantasy and Science Fiction titles in 1999. Her most recent publication is nonfiction, The Veil in the Looking Glass: A History of Women's Seclusion in the Middle East. She has also written many plays including Jihad, which won the best new off-off Broadway play of 1996.

The oldest daughter of mathematicians, granddaughter of a man kicked out of BYU for teaching evolution, sister to one physicist, one microbiologist, one computer scientist and two medical doctors. Ann was born in Salt Lake City, UT and raised there, in Strasbourg, France and Ulm and Marburg, Germany. She speaks English, French and German and struggles with Hebrew, Arabic, ancient Akkadian and Egyptian. She has been on her own in Aleppo, Syria, stood guard duty in Israel and been bitten by a snake in her own living room. She owns a small bookshop specializing in fantasy and historical titles (wanna do a booksigning?), raises chickens and organic vegetables, and folk and belly dances. She has two sons (one in informatics, the other in Middle East studies), a degree in Middle Eastern archaeology and has excavated at the Biblical city of Beersheva. She is active on the board of the Historical Novel Society. Visit her website.
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Brandon Sanderson

Brandon Sanderson was born in December of 1975 in Lincoln, Nebraska. As a child Brandon enjoyed reading, but he lost interest in the types of titles often suggested for him, and by junior high he never cracked a book if he could help it. This all changed in 8th grade when an astute teacher, Mrs. Reader, incidently, gave Brandon Dragon's Bane by Barbra Hambly. Brandon thoroughly enjoyed this book, and went in search of anything similar. He discovered such authors as David Eddings, Robin Hobb, Robert Jordan, Anne McCaffrey, and Orson Scott Card. He liked epic fantasy so much that he even tried his hand at writing some. His first attempts, he says, were dreadful.

In 1994 Brandon enrolled at Brigham Young University as a Bio-Chemistry major. However, while taking time away from his studies to serve a two-year mission in Seoul, Korea for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Brandon realized he did not miss chemistry but he did miss writing. Upon his return, Brandon became an English major, to the dismay of his mother, who wanted him to become a doctor.

He began writing in earnest, taking a job as the night desk clerk at a hotel because they allowed him to write while at work. During this time Brandon was going to school full time during the day, working nights to help pay for his schooling, and writing as much as he could. Working for The Leading Edge, BYU's Sci Fi/Fantasy magazine, was a wonderful experience for Brandon. He read lots of submissions, formed some lifelong friendships, and even served as Editor in Chief during his senior year.

Brandon learned much about the business side of being a writer by taking a class from David Farland, author of the popular Runelords series. One piece of advice Dave gave Brandon was to attend conventions, such as WorldCon and World Fantasy, in order to connect with industry professionals. Brandon and a small group of friends who were also aspiring writers began to do so. He eventually met both his current agent and one of his editors at conventions.

It was in 2003, while he was in the middle of a graduate program at BYU, that Brandon got a call from an editor at Tor Books who wanted to buy Elantris. Brandon had submitted the manuscript a year and a half earlier, and had almost given up on hearing anything, so he was surprised and delighted to receive the offer. In May of 2005 Brandon held his first published novel in his hands. Tor also published Brandon's Mistborn trilogy, and has plans to release other Sanderson titles in the future.

After graduating with his Master's degree in creative writing, Brandon was asked to teach the class he had taken as an undergraduate student from Dave Farland. In spite of his busy schedule, Brandon continues to teach this one section of creative writing focused on science fiction and fantasy because he enjoys helping aspiring writers. :It gets me out of the house," he says.

In July of 2006 Brandon married Emily Bushman. Emily had spent seven years as a teacher, but chose to quit with the birth of their son Joel in October of 2007. Emily now works from home part time as Brandon's business manager.

Brandon's repertoire expanded into the children's market when Scholastic published Alcatraz Versus the Evil Librarians, a middle-grade novel, in October of 2007. Nancy Pearl gave this book a very favorable review on National Public Radio, which pleased Sanderson fans. In December of 2007 Brandon was chosen by Harriet Rigney to complete A Memory of Light, book twelve in Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series.
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