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Home › About › Archive › CONvergence 2021: The Stuff of Legends › 2021 Guests

2021 Guests

Elsa Sjunneson

Headshot of Elsa Sjunneson peeking from behind a tree. Her hearing aid is visible in her ear and one her iris and pupil is milky white on one eye. Her other eye is blue. She is wearing purple glasses and pearls and has short, brown hair.

Elsa Sjunneson is a self-described Deafblind hurricane in a vintage dress. Her fiction and nonfiction writing has been praised as “eloquence and activism in lockstep” and has been published in dozens of venues around the world.

She has been a Hugo Award finalist seven times, and has won Hugo, Aurora, and BFA awards for her editorial work on Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction with Uncanny Magazine. As a fiction author, she has written “Captain Peggy Carter” for Women of Marvel and Jessica Jones: Playing With Fire, as well as for multiple game design franchises including the Nebula-nominated Fate Accessibility Toolkit.

When she isn’t writing, Sjunneson works to dismantle structural ableism and rebuild community support for disabled people everywhere. Her debut memoir, Being Seen: One Deafblind Woman’s Fight to End Ableism, releases in October of 2021 from Tiller Press.

Sjunneson lives in Seattle where she plays with swords for fun.

Learn more about Elsa Sjunneson at her website, www.snarkbat.com, and follow her on twitter as @snarkbat.

Laura Anne Gilman

Headshot of Laura Anne Gilman. She is wearing jeans and a blazer and smiling coyly at the camera. Her glasses are hanging from her collar. She has dark brown, shoulder-length hair.

Despite coming from a family of writers (and editors), Laura Anne Gilman always knew she wanted to get into publishing. Armed with a mostly-useless double major in English and History, she spent the first 17 years of her professional life on the editorial side of the desk, first with Putnam-Berkley, then at Penguin USA, and then at the newly-merged Putnam-Penguin, clawing her way from summer intern up to Executive Editor (which is a fancy way of saying “spends more time in meetings than actually editing.”)

At that point, she sold her first original novel, Staying Dead, and two sequels— leaping from the frying pan of NY publishing into the fire of being a freelance writer. She has occasionally looked back, but never once regretted the move.

Since then, her work has been hailed as “a true American myth” by NPR, and praised for her “deft plotting and first-class characters” by Publishers Weekly, among others. She won the Endeavor Award for The Cold Eye and has been shortlisted for a Nebula, (another) Endeavor, and a Washington State Book Award.

Her novels include the Locus-bestselling weird western Devil’s West novels, the Cosa Nostradamus urban fantasy series, the Vineart War trilogy. Her short fiction can be found in West Winds’ Fool and Darkly Human, as well as many magazines and anthologies.  She has also written cozy mysteries as L.A. Kornetsky, and paranormal romances as Anna Leonard (not to be confused with Anne Leonard).

She currently has two historical fantasies in the pipeline at Saga/Simon & Schuster, and a contemporary fantasy series being written on spec, as well as monthly stories only available via her Patreon.

A former New Yorker, Laura Anne currently lives in Seattle with a black cat, a red dog, and many deadlines.

Learn more about Laura Anne Gilman at her website, www.LauraAnneGilman.net, and follow her on twitter as @lagilman.

T. Aaron Cisco

Headshot of T. Aaron Cisco. He is a Black man in dark sunglasses with light facial hair, smiling slightly at the camera, wearing a gray hat.

T. Aaron Cisco is an award-winning author/essayist, tv producer, musician, and cosplaying chess nerd.

Born and raised in Chicago, his endeavors have taken him all over the world. He’s worked for NBC, ABC, and Amazon Prime Video, earned two local Emmy awards, and shared stages with numerous touring artists.

In 2018, he won First Place in the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists’ Page One Awards Arts Criticism/Review Online category for his piece “The Latest Black Panther Trailer Is Us” in Twin Cities Geek.

His literary works include Teleportality, Dragon Variation, Big Ass Aliens, and Black Nerd Blue Box: The Wibbly Wobbly Memoirs of a Lonely Whovian. His latest book, Rod String Nail Cloth: An Afrofuturist Mixtape, reached the top five on Amazon’s Top 100 lists for both Science Fiction Anthologies, and Black & African American Science Fiction.

Always keeping busy, he is the co-founder and coordinator of TC Trek Trivia, the only monthly pub trivia in Minnesota dedicated solely to all things Star Trek, as well as Wibbly Wobbly Wednesdays, the only monthly pub trivia in Minnesota dedicated solely to Doctor Who.

Learn more about T. Aaron Cisco at his website, blkintl.com, and follow him on Twitter as @composidore.

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