Special Guest Panel at #NEPCA2022!

What’s a popular culture conference without the opportunity to talk with some folks doing some of the amazing work that we all love and study so much?

Please join us at the NEPCA 2022 Conference Closing Panel on Saturday, October 22 from 1:30pm-2:45pm (EST) for a discussion roundtable with five award-winning writers of cross-genre fiction. Panel participants are Steven Brust, Emma Bull, Tim Powers, and Terri Windling.

These five creators cover more genres than fingers and toes on the (human) body! There’s action adventure, aliens, alternate history, dystopia, fairy and folk tales, fantasy, gambling, gender and genre-bending, ghosts, gods, horror, manner punk, recipes, romance, science fiction, skullduggery, spies, thrillers, unusual “animals”, westerns, vampires, young adults, the list goes on.   These writers/editors/directors/musicians/pet owners/world travelers and more, have been successfully publishing across various media (fiction and non-fiction) in the “United” States and abroad, since the late 1970’s. What are their secrets? What has changed in the industry, and for them, over the years? What is it like writing over the long haul? How do they deal with challenges? What keeps them engaged?

Please feel free to submit your questions for the panel in advance to angelawhyland6@gmail.com , your excited host. We’ll also be taking questions during the roundtable and are looking forward to a lively discussion, with all of you. 

This event is open to all Conference registrants.  Check out the Conference page for more information and be sure to register here.

About our Panelists

Steven Brust 

Born in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and raised in a family of Hungarian labor organizers, Steven Brustworked as a musician and a computer programmer before coming to prominence as a writer in 1983 with Jhereg, the first of his novels about Vlad Taltos, a human professional assassin in a world dominated by long-lived, magically empowered, human-like “Dragaerans.”  

Since then, many more “Taltos” novels have followed, interspersed with other work, including To Reign in Hell, a fantasy re-working of Milton’s war in Heaven; The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars, a contemporary fantasy based on Hungarian folktales; and a science fiction novel, Cowboy Feng’s Space Bar and Grille. In 1991, with The Phoenix Guards, Brust began another series, set a thousand years earlier than the Taltos books; its sequels are Five Hundred Years After and the three volumes of “The Viscount of Adrilankha”: The Paths of the Dead, The Lord of Castle Black, and Sethra Lavode. The 16th book in the Dragaera series, Tsalmoth, will be released April 25, 2023.  

While writing, Brust has continued to work as a musician, playing drums for the legendary band Cats Laughing and recorded an album of his own work, A Rose for Iconoclastes. 

Emma Bull 

Two of Emma Bull’s favorite childhood memories are of typing out nonsense words on her parents’ black Royal manual typewriter and watching the neighbor mow the lawn. Emma Bull went to Beloit College, where she majored in English, then moved to Minneapolis, where there are two seasons: Snow removal and road repair. (Or, as it sometimes seems, snow repair and road removal.)

After that, she moved back to her native southern California, where she would’ve driven with the top down if she’d had a convertible. She was a resident of the Republic of Bisbee (AZ), where everyone’s an artist at something, from painting to coffee roasting to pie baking. She spent several years in the desert outside Tucson, where she was all hat and no cattle. Great hat, though.

Now she’s back in Minneapolis, where she was supposed to be all along.

She’s written novels, screenplays, a children’s book, and short stories. Her first novel, War for the Oaks, was one of the works that defined the contemporary fantasy genre. Territory, the first half of her “secret history” fantasy retelling of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award.

She and her husband, Will Shetterly, were members of the Interstate Writers’ Workshop, aka “The Scribblies”. Emma taught fantasy writing at Hamline University in St. Paul for several years, and with Will has conducted fiction writing workshops in Los Angeles, at Clarion West, the Pima Writers Workshop, and elsewhere.

She was the creator, and co-producer with Elizabeth Bear, of Shadow Unit, a web fiction series conceived as episodes of a television show that never existed. It combines novella-length stories with hypertext “DVD extras” and character on-line journals. Contributing writers included Holly Black, Steven Brust, and Chelsea Polk.

Emma played guitar and sang in the Flash Girls, a goth-folk duo. She was a member of Cats Laughing, a psychedelic improv folk-jazz band that included Steven Brust, Adam Stemple, and Lojo Russo.

She’s a sucker for storytelling in any form—novels and short fiction, television, film, comics, song lyrics, you name it—and when not telling them herself, loves to discuss how stories are made.

Tim Powers 

Tim Powers is the author of seventeen science fiction and fantasy novels, including The Anubis Gates, Stolen Skies, and On Stranger Tides, which was the basis of the fourth “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie. His work has won the World Fantasy Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial award, and the Locus Poll award, and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Along with K. W. Jeter and James Blaylock, Powers is considered one of the founders of “Steampunk.”   He lives in San Bernardino, California, with his wife of more than forty years, Serena.   

Terri Windling 

Terri Windling is a writer, editor, artist, and folklorist specialising in fantasy and mythic arts. She has published over forty books, receiving ten World Fantasy Awards (including the lifetime achievement award in 2022), the Mythopoeic Award (for her novel The Wood Wife), the Bram Stoker Award, and the Science Fiction Writers Association’s Solstice Award for “outstanding contributions to the speculative fiction field as a writer, editor, artist, educator, and mentor”; she’s also been short-listed twice for the Shirley Jackson Award and once for the Tiptree (for “The Armless Maiden”).  

Terri writes fiction for adults and children, nonfiction on folklore and fairy tales, and a World Fantasy Award nominated blog: Myth & Moor. She has edited fantasy fiction since the 1980s, working with many of the major writers in the field; and she’s published anthologies for adult and young readers, including sixteen volumes in The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror series and six volumes in the Snow White, Blood Red series of adult fairy tales, all co-edited with Ellen Datlow. 

Born in the U.S., she now lives with her British husband (a theatre director and puppeteer) in a small Dartmoor village full of artists. They have one grown daughter, an elderly dog, and a tiny house crowded with books and puppets.