Conflux 5 Guests
Sharyn November
Sharyn November was born in New York City, and has stayed close by ever since. She received a B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied and wrote poetry; her work has appeared in Poetry, The North American Review, and Shenandoah, among other magazines, and she received a scholarship to Bread Loaf. She has been editing books for children and teenagers for over fifteen years, and is currently Senior Editor for Viking Children's Books and Puffin Books, as well as the Editorial Director of Firebird. Her writing about her work with teenage readers (both online and in person) has been published in The Horn Book and Voice of Youth Advocates, and she is currently working on an essay collection. She has been a board member of USBBY and ALAN, as well as being actively involved in ALA, NCTE, and SFWA. She was named a World Fantasy Award Finalist (Professional Category) in both 2004 and 2005-in 2004 specifically for Firebird, in 2005 for editing.
She has played in a variety of bands (songwriter, lead singer, rhythm guitar), and maintains an extensive personal Web site at www.sharyn.org. She drinks a lot of Diet Mountain Dew and likes to cause chaos in her wake.
The Firebird Web site is at www.firebirdbooks.com
Jack Dann
Jack Dann is a multiple award winning author who has written or edited over seventy books, including the groundbreaking novels Junction, Starhiker, The Man Who Melted, The Memory Cathedral - which is an international bestseller, the Civil War novel The Silent, and Bad Medicine. Jack is co-editor (with Janeen Webb) of the groundbreaking Australian anthology Dreaming Down-Under. Dreaming Down-Under, has won Australia's Ditmar Award and is the first Australian book ever to win the World Fantasy Award. Jack has been invited to be a tutor at the 2009 Clarion South workshop. He was a tutor at the first Clarion South in 2004. He lives in Australia on a farm overlooking the sea and 'commutes' back and forth to Los Angeles and New York.
Photo by Mark Greenslade
Cat Sparks
Cat Sparks is a writer, graphic designer, editor and photographer, with stories and artwork appearing in and on magazines, anthologies and book covers in Australia and abroad. In 2004 she was a graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers' Workshop in Queensland.
Cat was born in Sydney, Australia, but relocated to Wollongong eight years ago where she runs Agog! Press with her partner, author Robert Hood. She has traveled through parts of Europe, the Middle East, Indonesia, the South Pacific, Mexico and the lower states of North America. Her adventures so far have included: winning a trip to Paris in a Bulletin Magazine photography competition; being appointed official photographer for two NSW Premiers; working as dig photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan, and winning eight DITMAR awards including one for Best New Talent in 2002.
She was a prize winner in Writers of the Future, 2004 and was awarded the Aurealis Peter McNamara Conveners Award in 2004. In 2007 she won the Aurealis Award for best SF short story and the Golden Aurealis Award for best Australian speculative fiction story of the year.
Forty-five of her stories have been published since 2000.
Bruce Gillespie
Bruce Gillespie has spent his life living in and around Melbourne. He entered fandom in 1967, and produced SF Commentary 1 in January 1969. Since then he has published a vast number of fanzines, under such titles as The Metaphysical Review (begun in 1984) and Steam Engine Time (begun in 2000), as well as small-circulation fanzines for ANZAPA, Acnestis and other apas. He has also written many articles and reviews for Australian and overseas magazines. In 1975, he, Carey Handfield and Rob Gerrand founded Norstrilia Press, one of Australia's first SF small presses. Although it stopped publishing in 1985, many other small presses have kept up the tradition. Fandom has been kind to Bruce, giving him quite a few Ditmar and Atheling Awards, three Hugo nominations, and many other honours, such as Fan Guest of Honour at Aussiecon 3 (the worldcon held in Melbourne in 1999), the past presidency of Fan Writers of America (2005), the A. Bertram Chandler Award for lifetime achievement (2007) and the Peter McNamara Award, also for lifetime achievement (2008). The fans of Australia and America raised enough money in the BBB Fund campaign to enable Bruce to visit the west coast of America for a month in 2005. Bruce's wife, Elaine Cochrane, has put up with all this fan activity since 1978. Bruce and Elaine earn a minimal income from freelance book editing.
Gillian Polack
Gillian has one novel in print with a small new US press and another forthcoming. One of her novels was written at Varuna with the help of a Macquarie Bank Fellowship and a Blue Mountains Fellowship. Twelve of her short stories have been published. One of these stories won a Victorian Ministry of the Arts award and three more have been listed as recommended reading in the international lists of world's best fantasy and science fiction short stories by Ellen Datlow, Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.
Her doctorate in Medieval history led to her advising fiction writers on historical backgrounds and teaching workshops for writers on everything from how to talk to historians to the stuff of the Medieval imagination. Since Conflux 3 she has designed menus (wearing her food historian hat, which she also wears to blog at http://www.foodpast.com) for three Confluxes. She is a reviewer with Australian Speculative Fiction in Focus and has twice been a judge for the Aurealis awards.