Program Participant Biographies, Continued

Robbie Bourget

Robbie Bourget started out as an Ottawa area fan in Canada, where she became involved in the local Doctor Who club and the Ottawa Science Fiction Society (OSFS) before moving to Los Angeles and becoming involved in the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society (LASFS). Robbie has worked a variety of conventions, beginning as a rover at Maplecon in Ottawa (although they called it Security), moving on to Loscons in Los Angeles, Worldcons in a variety of places, and Gallifrey One, the local Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, now in its 20th year. She has worked predominantly in operations, but has been Art Show head at Eastercons in the UK, Treasurer for Loscons and Gallifreys, Division Head and Vice Chair at Worldcon level, Chair of both Loscon and Gallifrey one (more than once) and now finds herself Co-Chair of the 2009 Worldcon in Montreal, Anticipation. Robbie has also been a club fan, belonging to the Doctor Who club and OSFS in Ottawa; been President of the LASFS and Treasurer of same for 13 years (many of those years happily paired with Elayne Pelz) as well as belonging to the LASFS Board for more years; and been a Councillor for the Time Meddlers of Los Angeles for a few years. On top of all those endeavours, Robbie has also taken the time to participate in four apas (LASFAPA, APA-L, Gallifreyan Home Companion, and WOOF - once!) as well as helping to co-edit Holier Than Thou with Marty Cantor for several years. Robbie was also the co-DUFF winner with Marty Cantor in 1985 for Aussiecon II and produced her own version of the trip report which was printed Ace Double style with Marty's.

For reasons known only to herself, Robbie has resided in the UK since 1998 where she continues her con-running fannish life whilst abandoning all the rest. ;>
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Robert Hole

Robert Hole was born in a Michigan snow storm, and moved to a Fresno heat wave when he was 8 months old. He trained as a biologist (systematics and ecology) and has worked at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "I worked for US Fish and Wildlife Service, though, not the Smithsonian," he explains.

He's written one book, Dinosaurs and Other Ancient Animals (available through online retailers). Robert has been a dinosaur nut since before he could read and never grew out of it, though he has a slew of papers. A bibliography should be available at his website.

He is an artist, doing both spec fic and wildlife-related, and in the SF field considers himself more artist than writer.

He is currently working with the Roseville Historical Society's Carnegie Museum, a local history museum in Roseville, California.
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Bill Thomasson

Bill Thomasson is science/medial writer and activist both in politics and on disability issues.

He was born in 1936 in Pine Bluff, Arkansas and came north to attend the University of Chicago. He dropped out after a few years and followed the traditional family occupation of railway clerk until he was drafted. "Luckily, no one was shooting at us just then," he recalled. "President Kennedy announced he was sending 'advisors' to an obscure place called Viet Nam the month I got my release from active duty."

Thomasson went back to school and got a biochemistry PhD from Caltech in 1970. He taught in medical school and a couple of colleges for the next 8 years, until those jobs dried up. That's when he decided to try science/medical writing. He started out doing magazine articles, starting at the top by doing his first article for the Atlantic Monthly. After stints in public relations he shifted into medical writing, with increasing emphasis on helping researchers and their corporate sponsors craft articles for medical and dental research journals. For the past year and a half, he's been helping researchers in Ann Arbor with their research articles and grant applications.

In 2000 his second eye went bad (age-related macular degeneration), leaving him legally blind. Said Thomasson, "Being who I am, got me involved in disability activism including helping plan the 5th annual Disability Pride Parade."
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Christian B. McGuire

Christian B. McGuire was born a normal person in the distant past. Exposure to sensawonda radiation leaking from C. S. Lewis and Robert A. Heinlein mutated him into a reader.

Sometime later the volunteering bug sunk his mandibles into Christian's leg and he's been having delusions of being a con-runner ever since.

Christian is currently responsible for special projects for The Illustrators & Matte Artists, Local 790, having assembled the exhibit currently in Hall D, and looks forward to interviewing Rick Sternbach for Denvention 3.
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Daniel D. Dubrick

Daniel D. Dubrick is an aerospace and aviation historian. Since 1980 he has been active in northwest US fandom as a regular convention participant and volunteer.

Nicknamed "Kahboi" (pronounced "Cowboy" in English), Dubrick has for many years been the Editor for the H.R. McMillan Planetarium's affiliated space and astronomy educational BBS "SpaceBase(tm)." At the peak of Fidonet's success, the results of Dan's editing effort were reaching out to over 5,000 amateur BBS's world wide weekly and a readership estimated in the tens of thousands.

Said Dubrick, "I've spent two weeks, as press, at John F. Kennedy Space Center, following STS-89 from launch to landing, actually spotting Endeavour shortly after the double sonic boom." On his annual holidays he can be found prowling the aerospace bone yards of the Arizona desert studying American aerospace history (but they still won't let him into the B-52 that dropped the X-15).

Currently he is working on converting "SpaceBase" and its gigs of space science news data from a BBS system to an Internet based archive with an Internet e-mail distribution system.
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David B. Coe

David B. Coe is the award-winning author of nine fantasy novels and the occasional short story. His LonTobyn Chronicle (Children of Amarid, The Outlanders, and Eagle-Sage, all published by Tor Books) received the Crawford Fantasy Award, given annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts to the best work by a new author in fantasy.

Coe received his undergraduate degree from Brown University and then attended Stanford University as a graduate student in United States history. He received both a Master's and a Ph.D. from Stanford, completing his doctoral dissertation in U.S. environmental history in 1993. He briefly taught history at the University of the South, and continues to give guest lectures in the University's environmental studies program. Added Coe, "I'm also an avid birdwatcher and have, at previous cons, done presentations on birds of prey and how to use them accurately and realistically in writing."

In 2006, Coe was a guest speaker at the Magic Casements Speculative Fiction Festival in Sydney, Australia. He has twice been a guest speaker at the Sewanee Young Writers' Conference at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, and has twice been a faculty member at the annual South Carolina Writers' Workshop Conference.

Coe's novels have been translated into more than half a dozen languages, including Russian, German, French, and Spanish. He has also published several short stories. The most recent, "Cassie's Story," appears in the current issue of Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show.

His latest novel, The Sorcerers' Plague (Tor Books), is the first installment in his Blood of the Southlands trilogy, a follow-up to the critically acclaimed Winds of the Forelands sequence (Rules of Ascension, Seeds of Betrayal, Bonds of Vengeance, Shapers of Darkness, Weavers of War).

Visit his website.
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Diana Herald

Diana Tixier Herald is the author of several readers' advisory guides including four editions of Genreflecting: A Guide to Reading Interests, Teen Genreflecting (now in its second edition), and Fluent in Fantasy. She co-authored Fluent in Fantasy: The Next Generation and Strictly Science Fiction with Bonnie Kunzel. She is a regular reviewer of science fiction, fantasy, and paranormal novels for Booklist. She is the series editor for Library Unlimited's Genreflecting Series of readers' advisory guides and senior editor for Reader's Advisor Online.

Her roots are deep in the mountain West including Pueblo ancestors and 16th century Spanish settlers. She grew up as an Air Force brat, living in Okinawa, Arizona, and Michigan but spent half her time in Colorado. After a decade as a fiber artist utilizing her degree from Western State College of Colorado she earned a master's degree in Librarianship and Information Management from the University of Denver. After serving as a library director and popular materials librarian she is now a guerilla librarian putting teens together with the books they will love.

A frequent presenter at library conferences Herald has chaired two major preconferences about science fiction and fantasy for the Public Library Association and the Young Adult Library Services Association both divisions of the American Library Association. She has appeared on panels at several World Science Fiction Conventions and at DragonCon.

She lives on the edge of a Rocky Mountain canyon at 7,000 ft. altitude with her husband in a sustainable house they built from recycled materials. They have been living completely off-grid for 5 years.

Herald reads a book a day and her favorite quote is from Betty Rosenberg's first law of reading, "Never apologize for your reading tastes." She adds her own frequently quoted corollary, "No two people ever read the same book."
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Ed Meskys

Ed Meskys, age 72, has been an active fan since 1955, and a fanzine publisher since 1959. He started fanzine NIEKAS in 1962, which has been nominated for the Hugo three times and received it in 1966. It is still published, albeit very irregularly.

Meskys was born in Brooklyn in 1936 of parents born in Lithuania. His father was displaced by WWI in 1917. His father later married and brought his mother from over from Lithuania in 1930. Meskys spoke Lithuanian at home and learned English as second language when started school. In 1962 he took a job at the Lawrence Radiation Labs in Livermore, California, where he had a "Q" (nuclear weapons) security clearance. He also held summer jobs at Fort Monmouth NJ (secret clearance) and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He has a BS (cum laude) and MS in Physics from St. John's University in New York. He preferred teaching to research and started at Belknap College in Center Harbor in 1966.

He became blind in 1971 from a detached and torn retina in his remaining eye (having previously lost the other one in 1953). Meskys has served on the Governor's Commission on Disabilities in New Hampshire since its founding in 1978 and was an alternate delegate to the White House Conference on Disabilities in Washington 1978. He joined the National Federation of the Blind of NH in 1975 and has been a state officer since 1976, ten of those years off and on as state president.

As for SF, Meskys explained, "I was always interested in science fiction and got involved with the world-wide network of enthusiasts ('fandom') in 1955, started attending conventions in 1956, and publishing an amateur magazine in 1959." He has been married to fan Sandra Parker Shorter since 1989, and has a son Stanley from his first marriage. He was also president of the Tolkien Society of America for five years.

In addition to NIEKAS, he does the free e-fanzine, The View from Entropy Hall, which can be found on efanzines.com.
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Elaine Isaak

Elaine Isaak began writing stories at an early age, and her mother's keepsake chest contains several tiny spiral-bound notebooks full of childish block-lettered tales. She spent much of her youth guiding her friends on imaginary quests and rescues in the forests of central Massachusetts.

After discarding other career options including archaeology and genetic engineering, Elaine elected to attend the Rhode Island School of Design, intending to study fashion design and perhaps work for the theater, combining her interests in art and literature. Instead, she opted for a sculpture major where she created artworks based on the history of books and wrote an installation proposal no artwork could hope to live up to.

While studying abroad in Italy, Elaine acknowledged her inner drive and withdrew from school to work on a novel. In the meantime, she worked creating animal mascot costumes for corporations and parades. During this time, Elaine wrote The Singer's Crown, the third novel she began, and the second one she completed. In 1997, she founded Curious Characters, creating and marketing unique stuffed animals like greelings, hyffers, and the Amazing Zahnee! Part of the plan included a "storyletter," The Curious Times, where Elaine told stories about the mythos of these creatures to introduce them to the public.

Rekindling an old passion for poetry, Elaine became a regular at a local coffee house open mike where she discovered a new passion: Edward, a fellow poet, who married her. They bought an old house, painted it mint green, and moved in two cats, two computers and a collection of masks from around the world. That same year, she attended the Odyssey Speculative Fiction Workshop where she learned to sculpt words into something stronger, bolder and better by far.

After taking time to visit India, China, and Mongolia, Elaine and Ed welcomed their daughter, Laurel, and new son, Gabriel. In addition to soft sculpture, Curious Characters specializes in a line of fun and supportive small-scale metal sculptures available at gift shops across the country. Elaine writes in a quiet office in her new brick house, where she is free at any moment to leap into a new adventure.

The Singer's Crown appeared in 2005 from Eos Books, with its sequel, The Eunuch's Heir appearing the following year. Elaine is thrilled to announce that The Bastard Queen has recently found a home at Swimming Kangaroo, and will finally be available to readers at the beginning of 2010.

In the meantime, she has written eight other books ranging from dark medieval fantasy to romantic suspense, which she hopes will infiltrate bookstores shortly. She also writes the Lady Blade column on fantasy writing at Alien Skin Magazine on-line.

Elaine lives in New Hampshire and you can visit her website to find out why you do not want to be her hero.
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John Hertz

John Hertz was given the Big Heart Award in 2003. He has two Hugo nominations as Best Fanwriter ('07, '06). He was sent to the 2007 Worldcon by a one-time travel fund, HANA (Hertz Across to Nippon Alliance). At cons he can be found moderating panels, leading Art Show tours, as a Masquerade judge or M.C., or in the Fanzine Lounge. His fanzine is Vanamonde; two collections of his writing have been published, Dancing and Joking ('05) and West of the Moon ('02). He is one of three judges for the Rotsler Award (annual, for long-time wonderworking with graphic art in fanzines; carries $300 honorarium). His favorite non-SF authors are Chuang Tzu, Maimonides, Nabokov, and Sayers. He drinks Talisker. Born in Chicago, he lives in Los Angeles; he went to Antioch (B.A. philosophy, National Merit Scholar) and Northwestern (J.D. cum laude). He says, "The people I have bitten in the neck have been female. It was peaceable and seemed a good idea at the time."
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