NYT bestseller and middle son of the Nebula Grandmaster Anne McCaffrey, discovered Space Cat, and was delighted that his mother wrote it. He earned his first typewriter and started writing at 12. He wrote in between the US Army, boardgaming, software engineering and parenting. His first sale was in 1986. He collaborated on five Dragonriders of Pern®, and wrote three Pern novels, many short stories. His latest, City of Angels, is about AI.  toddmccaffrey.org

Award-winning author of The Elephant’s Girl and Tips for Magicians. Musical theater performer, advocate for wildlife and the arts. Living in a military family around the United States inspired her settings. She graduated from the Institute of Children’s Literature, has a BYU degree in Sociology. Member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators, visits schools across the United States, teaches and encourages children to write their stories. Celestarimington.com

John Goodwin is president of Galaxy Press, publisher of the L. Ron Hubbard Writers of the Future anthology, and host of the award-winning Writers & Illustrators of the Future Podcast.

Wulf Moon is a bestselling writer, editor, and writing instructor. At fifteen, Moon won the national Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, and followed that with winning the Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Contest, and Writers of the Future. He leads the Wulf Pack Writers group. He’s won both Best Author and Best Writers Workshop four years running in the Critters Readers’ Choice Awards, and is the author of How to Write a Howling Good Story. www.thesupersecrets.com

Rodayne earned his MFA in illustration from Syracuse University in 1990. He has twenty years of professional art studio experience and has taught thousands of students at UVU and other schools. He is an accomplished artist and has a rich set of experience creating and teaching a variety of illustration and animation art techniques. Among other things he is an expert in 3D Art modeling, Digital Art Storyboarding for Animation, and Digital Storytelling through art. He earned the IDMAA Award for Leadership in the Digital Media Arts, Multimedia Educator of the Year (State of Utah), the NISOD Excellence Award from The University of Texas, Austin, the Distinguished Scholar Award and Service Learning Award. 

Will Munn is the award-nominated and bestselling creator of Arium, the worldbuilding RPG. He runs the Adept Icarus game design studio and has collaborated on RPGs such as Cold Shadows, Tiny Frontiers, and Zorro, the Roleplaying Game. Will also serves as a publisher for multiple award-winning and bestselling game designers. All four continental US timezones have been his home, but he’s never moved without his towel.

Mickey George is the author of the YA historical novel Speak Easy, Speak Love, a retelling of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, from Greenwillow / HarperCollins. Her graphic novel, The Heart Hunter, illustrated by V. Gagnon, is out from Legendary Comics, in addition to the comic adaptation of Enola Holmes, starring Millie Bobby Brown and Henry Cavill. She also writes game scripts for visual novel apps. She also works as a bookseller at The King’s English Bookshop and has worked as an acquisitions editor for Flux Publishing.

John has written the Polecat Protocol science fiction series, the Riland Throne YA fantasy trilogy, and has published over forty short stories. He won the League of Utah Writers Emerald Typewriter for best published short story of the year with “Death by Misadventure” and he won the DragonComet short story competition in 2018 with “When Words Fail.” He has also written stories for and edited award winning anthologies. He is a past president of the League of Utah Writers and loves to encourage writers (especially local authors) to excel. johnmolsen.blogspot.com

Take raw imagination. Two parts coffee to one part whiskey. Equal heaping spoonfuls of angst, whimsy, snark, and a dash of imposter syndrome. Drop in an MFA and sprinkle a healthy dose of shenanigans on top while chanting either “What’s a gleeman?” or “Tell me a story,” to personal taste. Best served with a cloak of tales at Con temperature. Shiny!