We are delighted to welcome author Nancy Kress as our GoH in 2019.

From her Bio:

Nancy Kress is the author of thirty-three books, including twenty-six novels, four collections of short stories, and three books on writing. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Her most recent work is TERRAN TOMORROW, the conclusion of her YESTERDAY’S KIN series. Like much of her work, this series concerns genetic engineering. Kress’s fiction has been translated into Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, and Klingon, none of which she can read. In addition to writing, Kress often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including a visiting lectureship at the University of Leipzig, a 2017 writing class in Beijing, and the annual intensive workshop Tao Toolbox, which she teaches every summer with Walter Jon Williams.

From a personal standpoint, I remember Kress as my first Hugo pick. I read "Beggers in Spain" and thought: "This is the kind of thing that should win an award." It then picked up the Hugo and Nebula for Best Novella. Hmm, I thought, maybe these Hugo people know something...

For an added bonus, Nancy comes with Jack Skillingstead, her husband and a writer in his own right, with three novels and over forty short stories to his bibliography.

also in newsletter

Experience a taste of Foolscap at the May Mini-Foolscap, May 20 - 1:30 to 4:00, Kent Regional Library in the Small Meeting Room

Mini-Foolscaps are held in an afternoon and are a fun chance to talk with friends and show off our Foolscap Flavor. We hold a mini-panel, then brainstorm a bit, then discuss whatever we've come up with. The first topic this month is "Spoilers: When, Why, and How", inspired by the huge discussion about where people can discuss the latest Marvel installment.

Guest of Honor Seanan McGuire

Our Foolscap 2018 GOH will be SEANAN McGUIRE! (Her name is pronounced SHAWN-in, in case you were wondering or hoping to greet her in the halls.)

From her web page biography:

Seanan is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. In case that wasn't enough, she also writes under the pseudonym "Mira Grant." For details on her work as Mira, check out MiraGrant.com.

[Foolscap here: Here’s a small sample about Mira Grant: All three Newsflesh novels have been nominated for Hugo Awards, as has “Countdown,” the first novella in the Newsflesh universe, and Parasite, the first novel of the Parasitology series.]

In her spare time, Seanan records CDs of her original filk music (see the Albums page for details). She is also a cartoonist, and draws an irregularly posted autobiographical web comic, "With Friends Like These...", as well as generating a truly ridiculous number of art cards. Surprisingly enough, she finds time to take multi-hour walks, blog regularly, watch a sickening amount of television, maintain her website, and go to pretty much any movie with the words "blood," "night," "terror," or "attack" in the title. Most people believe she doesn't sleep.

Seanan lives in an idiosyncratically designed labyrinth in the Pacific Northwest, which she shares with her cats, Alice and Thomas, a vast collection of creepy dolls and horror movies, and sufficient books to qualify her as a fire hazard. She has strongly-held and oft-expressed beliefs about the origins of the Black Death, the X-Men, and the need for chainsaws in daily life.

Years of writing blurbs for convention program books have fixed Seanan in the habit of writing all her bios in the third person, so as to sound marginally less dorky. Stress is on the "marginally." It probably doesn't help that she has so many hobbies.

Seanan was the winner of the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2010. In 2013 she became the first person ever to appear five times on the same Hugo Ballot.