Program Participant Biographies, Continued

Karen Jordan

Karen Jordan is a fan. At Denvention she will be helping out with an origami workshop. She has also been working on membership transfers, coordinating Artist Demos and helping to organize volunteers for other aspects of the convention. As she puts its, "I'm not a writer or anything. I'm a convention groupie! I pay to volunteer! "

She was born and raised in Aiea, Hawaii. She came to Colorado to attend Colorado College where she earned a BA in math and an MA in teaching. She stayed and married Erin Jordan. They have a house, 4 cats, and a dog. Karen uses origami to teach math at Wasson High School in Colorado Springs, CO.
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Kathy Sullivan

Kathryn Sullivan was born and raised in the Chicago suburb of Berkeley, Illinois. She started writing science fiction and fantasy not long after she had finished reading all of the books in her father’s reading collection. Stories about girl agents defeating alien bad guys and tales of wizards’ apprentices looking for forgotten treasure filled school notebooks alongside her regular homework. Her short stories have appeared in print zines, ezines and three anthologies. Her first published novel was The Crystal Throne, which won the EPPIE for Best Fantasy. Her short story collection, Agents & Adepts, won the Dream Realm Award for Best Anthology. She continues to write young adult fantasy and science fiction. She is a proud member of Broad Universe and EPIC.

Lancer Kind

Lancer Kind grew up on a farm in Montana, where his nearest neighbor lived two miles away. This means he had a lot of time to read his mom's science fiction. It's this genre that he blames to this day for getting him into trouble while growing up, such as the time he made an electric go-cart with a Radio Flyer wagon, an electric motor, and his dad's favorite, long extension cord.

His job as a computer consultant puts him in strange situations faster than he can write about using the short story or novel form. His boss had suggested he write white papers. Lancer pretended to mishear and instead produces an online comic called Scrum Noir. (http://ScrumNoir.com) Each episode follows a hard boiled computer consultant named Ace who helps software teams overcome trouble during their transition to agile methodologies.

Today, Lancer is active in the SF community. When not snowboarding, consulting, or wooing his beautiful wife, he's writing fiction that entertains and attempts to make you think about the problems of today. His work appears in several anthologies such as Ruins Terra (ed. Eric T. Reynolds), Speculative Realms (ed. Sasha Beatie), and Teacher Miracles (ed. Brian Thornton). Later this year, his story "Casino New Orleans" will appear in Global Warming Aftermaths. His current projects include producing articles about Activist SF, a new novel, the occasional YouTube video (http://youtube.com/user/lancerkind), and starting a commercial wind farm.

Laura Majerus

Laura Majerus got involved in fandom in high school in Iowa when she was convinced to attend Icon II put on by SFLIS (the Science Fiction League of Iowa Students) in Iowa City. She's been a fan in the midwest and on both coasts. She has two computer science degrees and a law degree. She worked as a software engineer at Rockwell International before attending law school and has practiced software patent law for over 20 years, first in Washington, D.C. and then in Silicon Valley. In 2007, she left law firm life to work in-house at Google. She has been pro bono counsel to the Open Source Initiative and remains interested in all areas of intellectual property and open source law. She is currently remodeling a house in her spare time. She has lots of former hobbies that just don't fit in right now.

She currently lives in San Carlos, California with her husband, Howard Davidson, their 6 year old son, Corwin, and three cats, Veracity, Chaos, and Thumper.
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Lauren Patten

Though she has lived in suburban Denver with her husband for thirty years, Lauren Patten is among a rare breed: a native of Washington, D.C.—a city where odd and fantastical occurrences happen every day. Degreed in History and Anthropology, she has worked as a freelance archaeologist on medieval/castle sites in Great Britain, a tour guide at the Smithsonian, a high school history teacher, actor/singer, certified herbalist, pottery instructor, and book editor. She has been writing for more than twenty-five years, and has published various articles and short stories (Her recent story, Kilning Spree, can be found in the Rocky Mtn. Fiction Writers' Tales from Mistwillow anthology, which has been nominated for the Colorado Book Award.) Currently, Lauren is co-owner/editor of a non-fiction publishing company, Stone Dagger Publications, that specializes in archaeology/anthropology titles.

"As a teen, I used to read every fantasy novel I could lay my hands on: Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Poul Anderson—the classics. But the stories that most caught my imagination and inspired me to write were the pulp heroic fantasies of Moorcock, Howard, Leiber, and especially John Jakes. My high-school librarian told me that these were not the kind of books girls read, but I always appreciated their clean, no-nonsense, say-it-and-get-out style. The best writing advice I ever received was: 'Don't try to commit ART; just tell the story.' That style of writing may be (sadly) out of fashion right now, but it's still what I like to read."

Lauren's heroic fantasy novel, The Talent Sinistral, is scheduled for release in October of 2009.
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Laurie Toby Edison

Laurie Toby Edison has been a jeweler since 1969 and a photographer since 1989. She has been exhibiting her work at conventions for over 25 years; retrospectives of her jewelry and sculpture have been featured at LACon, Noreascon and ConJose. In 1994 she published Women En Large: Images of Fat Nudes, a black & white fine art photography book (edited and text by Debbie Notkin). Edison's photographs have been exhibited in New York City, Tokyo, Kyoto, Toronto, Boston, London, and San Francisco. Familiar Men: A Book of Nudes was published in 2004. Her recently completed work on Women of Japan, clothed portraits of women from many cultures and backgrounds, was a featured exhibition at Nippon 2007. 100 of her photographs were shown in her exhibition "Meditations on the Body: Recent Work" at the National Museum of Art in Osaka in August 2001.
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Madeleine Robins

Madeleine E. Robins is a native New Yorker who has studied stage combat, sung at renaissance festivals, ghost-written psychology texts, and edited comic books. In addition, she's the author of a generous double-handful of SF and fantasy short stories, and of the urban fantasy The Stone War ( a New York Times Notable Book for 1999), and Point of Honour and Petty Treason (both recounting the hardboiled adventures of Sarah Tolerance, Agent of Inquiry, on the mean streets of Regency London). Now living in San Francisco with one husband, two daughters and Emily, a Moldavian Leaping Hound, she divides her writing time between a third Sarah Tolerance book and an historical novel set in medieval Italy. She is currently learning cake decorating, with which skills she hopes to subvert the dominant paradigm.
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Mary Robinette Kowal

Mary Robinette Kowal is a professional puppeteer who moonlights as a writer. Originally from North Carolina, she lives in New York with her husband, Rob. She is a graduate of Orson Scott Card's Literary BootCamp and a current finalist for the Campbell Award for Best New Writer. Her short fiction appears in Cosmos, Strange Horizons, and Clarkesworld Magazine.

In addition to her writing, Mary Robinette works as a voice actor, recording fiction for writers such as Cory Doctorow, Orson Scott Card and Elizabeth Bear. Visit her website, www.maryrobinettekowal.com to download audio fiction, learn about her puppetry or browse the short stories.
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Petrea Mitchell

Petrea Michell says "I'm originally from Berkeley. People sometimes say that this explains a lot."

She says she had the extraordinary good luck to be born to fannish parents who gafiated when she was in her teens, thus allowing her to stay connected with fandom at a time when "liking the same things as my parents would have been embarrassing." The earliest convention memories she can place to a specific con are from Denvention II, where she was put to work as a credit-card runner at Art Show pickup.

In the intervening time, she's had the opportunity to experience nearly all the various strands of fandom. "I still haven't made it to a furry convention yet." Her current fannish activities include: being a reader for the Endeavour Award (given to the best sf book by a Pacific Northwestern author); publishing a fanzine, Picofarad (The Zine of Little Capacity); maintaining the alt.fan.harry-potter FAQ; attempting to be a panelist and occasionally succeeding; and random at-con volunteering.

Petrea started Picofarad in 2004 when several thoughts about things one could do in an sf periodical context came together. At first she wrote all of it, but says she always intended it to be open to contributors, and it has acquired a few. Picofarad has settled in at 4 issues a year, with a new one (#14 in this case) always available at Worldcon.

She says she is "currently working on a user manual--no, a manual about users, for the benefit of programmers."
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Robert Hoyt

Robert Hoyt was raised in Colorado, largely in Colorado Springs. He is now a senior in the IB program (an International Baccalaureate), a program for advanced students, at Palmer High School, but has been writing since elementary school. At the age of 14, he started writing his first novel, which, (after being properly polished as he gained experience) is now under consideration by a major publishing house.

He currently has two professional sales, the latest of which will be appearing in the anthology Better Off Undead. He is studying toward his goal of getting an MD and specializing in neuro-surgery.

He likes cats, coffee, and quiet hours for writing things that aren't homework assignments.
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