The following authors will be guests at Alpha in 2012:
Tamora Pierce has been publishing since the mid-eighties. Known for her powerful female heroes and her career as a writer for teens, it might be surprising for some to learn that her first quartet was originally one book written for an adult audience. The advice of her employer Claire Smith, soon to be her agent, led her to re-write The Song of the Lioness into four smaller books for teens, and the rest is literary history. Before she made a living as a writer, Pierce did everything from temp work to reviews of martial arts movies. She met her husband, Tim Liebe, while the two of them were working at a radio production company that wrote comedy and drama for NPR and some big city stations.
With almost thirty books in print, including the anthologies she’s both participated in and written herself, it’s no wonder she has a following all over world; her books have been translated into Japanese, Danish, German, Thai, Swedish, and are forthcoming in Italian. The last book in her Beka Cooper series, Mastiff, was released in November 2011.
Kij Johnson is the author of three published novels, many short stories, and several essays, and a winner of the Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, and Crawford Awards. Her short-story collection, At the Mouth of the River of Bees, will be published in the summer of 2012 by Small Beer Press. She has also worked in New York publishing, and in comics and games publishing. She lives in Raleigh, North Carolina.
John Joseph Adams—called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble.com—is the bestselling editor of many anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, The Living Dead 2, By Blood We Live, Federations, The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Way of the Wizard. He is a two-time finalist for the Hugo Award and a three-time finalist for the World Fantasy Award. He is also the editor and publisher of Lightspeed Magazine, and is the co-host of The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Find him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.
Catherynne M. Valente is the New York Times bestselling author of over a dozen works of fiction and poetry, including Palimpsest, the Orphan’s Tales series, Deathless, and the crowdfunded phenomenon The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making. She is the winner of the Andre Norton Award, the Tiptree Award, the Mythopoeic Award, the Rhysling Award, and the Million Writers Award She has been nominated for the Hugo, Locus, and Spectrum Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award in 2007 and 2009. She lives on an island off the coast of Maine with her partner, two dogs, and enormous cat.
Past author guests include Michael Arnzen, Catherine Asaro, Holly Black, Tobias S. Buckell, Lawrence C. Connolly, Timons Esaias, Charles Coleman Finlay, Carl Frederick, James Frenkel, Gregory Frost, Theodora Goss, Alan Irvine, Scott A. Johnson, Michael Kandel, Ellen Kushner, David Levine, Christopher McKitterick, Tamora Pierce, Bruce Holland Rogers, Wen Spencer, William Tenn, Harry Turtledove, Leslie What, Sheila Williams, and Timothy Zahn.
