Linda D. Addison
Literary Guest of Honor
(born September 8, 1952) is an American poet and writer of horror, fantasy, and science fiction. Addison is the first African-American winner of the Bram Stoker Award, which she won four times. The first two awards were for her poetry collections Consumed, Reduced to Beautiful Grey Ashes (2001)[1] and Being Full of Light, Insubstantial (2007).[2] Her poetry and fiction collection How To Recognize A Demon Has Become Your Friend won the 2011 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a Poetry Collection.[3] She received a fourth HWA Bram Stoker for the collection The Four Elements, written with Marge Simon, Rain Graves, and Charlee Jacob. Addison is a founding member of the CITH (Circles in the Hair) writing group
Nisi Shawl
Literary Guest of Honor
Nisi Shawl is an African-American writer, editor, and journalist., James Tiptree, Jr. Award Winner, author of Everfair (2016), Talk Like A Man (2019). Shawl’s story “Cruel Sistah” was included in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror #19. Her work has also appeared in So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy and both Dark Matter anthologies. Recently she perpetrated “The Snooted One: The Historicity of Origin” at the Farrago’s Wainscot website. With Cynthia Ward, she co-authored “Writing the Other: Bridging Cultural Differences for Successful Fiction” (Aqueduct Press). A board member of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, one of the Carl Brandon Society’s founders, and a guest speaker at Stanford University and Smith College. Nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel, World Fantasy Award—Long Fiction, and World Fantasy Award—Collection
Crystal Connor
Multimedia Guest of Honor
An award-winning Master Imaginationist. She work for the Department of Sleep Prevention as the Chief Operating Officer for the Bad Dreams & Nightmare Division. She also moonlights as photographer for Instagram. Or in layman’s terms she writes horror and takes tons of selfies. She is a Washington State native, and she loves everything to do with monsters, bad guys (as in evil-geniuses & super-villains. Not those kind her mother warned her about), rogue scientific experiments, jewelry, sky-high high-heeled shoes & unreasonably priced handbags. When she’s not terrorizing my readers or racking up frequent flyers miles by gallivanting all over the country attending fan conventions and writer’s conferences she reviews indie horror and science fiction films for both her personal blog and HorrorAddicts.net and judge horror films for the Seattle Crypticon and the Bleedingham film festivals.
www.wordsmithcrystalconnor.com
Sumiko Saulson
Sumiko Saulson is a cartoonist, science-fiction, fantasy and horror writer, editor of Black Magic Women, Scry of Lust and 100 Black Women in Horror Fiction, author of Solitude, Warmth, The Moon Cried Blood, Happiness and Other Diseases, Somnalia, Insatiable, Ashes and Coffee, and Things That Go Bump In My Head. She wrote and illustrated comics Mauskaveli, Dooky and graphic novels Dreamworlds and Agrippa. She writes for the SEARCH Magazine and the San Francisco Bayview column Writing While Black. The child of African American and Russian-Jewish parents, a native Californian and an Oakland resident who’s spent most of their adult life in the San Francisco Bay Area.
2020 African American Multimedia Conference 