Science Fiction • Fantasy • Horror • Adult • Young Adult • Middle Grade • KidLit

Prose • Film and TV Scripts •
Comics • Graphic Novels • Games •
Podcasts • Plays

This class is designed for all writers from any background no matter where you are on the spectrum from newbie to professional.

Steven Barnes is a New York Times bestselling, award-winning novelist, screenwriter, and creator of the Lifewriting writing course. He has been nominated for Hugo, Nebula, and Cable Ace awards, won an Emmy for the “A Stitch In Time” episode of The Outer Limits, and an NAACP Image Award as co-author of the Tennyson Hardwick mystery series with actor Blair Underwood and his wife, Tananarive Due.

Steven has written three million words of published fiction published in seven languages, including comic books and over 20 novels. His television credits include Baywatch, Stargate SG-1, and Andromeda. In addition to Lifewriting, he teaches webinars on Afrofuturism and Black Horror.

Max Gladstone is a Hugo-, Nebula-, and Locus Award winning author who has been thrown from a horse in Mongolia and once wrecked a bicycle in Angkor Wat. He is the author of many books, including Empress of Forever, the Craft Sequence of fantasy novels, and, with Amal El-Mohtar, the internationally bestselling This is How You Lose the Time War.

Andrea Hairston is a playwright, novelist, and scholar. She has published three novels: Will Do Magic For Small Change, a finalist for the Mythopoeic, Lambda, and Tiptree Awards, a Massachusetts Must Read, and a New York Times Editor’s pick; Redwood and Wildfire, winner of the Tiptree and Carl Brandon Awards; Mindscape, winner of the Carl Brandon Award. Lonely Stardust, a collection of essays and plays, was published by Aqueduct press. Andrea has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council.

In her spare time, Andrea is the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Africana Studies at Smith College and the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre. She bikes at night year round, meeting bears, multi-legged creatures of light and breath, and the occasional shooting star.

Nisi Shawl is the author of Everfair, Talk Like A Man, and dozens of short stories, many of which can be found in the James Tiptree, Jr. Award-winning and World Fantasy Award-nominated collection Filter House. Nisi is the co-editor of Stories for Chip and Strange Matings: Octavia E. Butler, Feminism, Science Fiction, and African American Voices. On their own they edited the multiple award-winning anthology New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction by People of Color and they’re currently working on New Suns 2. Nisi is a founding member of the Carl Brandon Society and have served on the board for the Clarion West writing workshop.

Nisi developed the Writing the Other workshop with Cynthia Ward, and has taught it for over a decade in person and online.

K. Tempest Bradford is an award-winning teacher, media critic, and author of fantasy and science fiction steeped in Black Girl Magic. Her debut middle grade novel, Ruby Finley vs. the Interstellar Invasion, won the 2022 Andre Norton Nebula Award and is nominated for an IGNYTE Award.

Tempest’s short fiction has appeared in multiple anthologies and magazines, including New Suns 2 and Strange Horizons. Her media criticism and essays on diversity and representation have been published at NPR, io9, Ebony Magazine, and more.

She’s the recipient of the 2023 LOCUS Special Award for Developing Diversity in Genre Communities, the 2020 LOCUS Special Award for Inclusivity and Representation Education, and the 2022 Lemonade Award. She’s been nominated for FIYAH Magazine‘s IGNYTE Community and Ember Awards.

Lauren Jankowski, author of Sere from the Green and other books in The Shape Shifter Chronicles series, is the founder of Asexual Artists and co-founder of Pack of Aces. She holds a B.A. in Women and Gender Studies from Beloit College. Her presentation on asexuals in media, “Where are the Asexual Voices,” debuted at C2E2 in 2016.

Jaymee Goh is a writer of fiction, poetry, and academese from Malaysia. Her creative work has been published in Strange Horizons and Lightspeed Magazine, and her non-fiction has appeared in publications such as Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution and Science Fiction Studies. She co-edited The Sea is Ours: Tales of Steampunk Southeast Asia and edited The WisCon Chronicles Vol. 11: Trials by Whiteness.

She is a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing Workshop and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside. Her dissertation was on whiteness and multiculturalism in steampunk, a topic she has written and presented on at various conventions across North America, and she blogs about postcoloniality and steampunk at Silver Goggles.