Alpha is pleased to announce that authors Tamora Pierce, Ellen Kushner, and Delia Sherman will teach at the 2015 workshop.
Tamora Pierce
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 Italian. Her latest book, Battle Magic, was released in September 2013.
Ellen Kushner
Ellen Kushner began her career in publishing as a fiction editor in New York City, but left to write her first novel, Swordspoint, which has become a cult classic, hailed as the progenitor of the “mannerpunk” (or “Fantasy of Manners”) school of urban fantasy. Swordspoint was followed by Thomas the Rhymer (World Fantasy Award and the Mythopoeic Award), and two more novels in her “Riverside” series. Her short fiction appears regularly in various anthologies. Ellen Kushner’s fiction has been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, French, Dutch, German, Spanish, Latvian and Finnish. She has narrated and co-produced “illuminated” versions of all three of the “Riverside” novels with SueMedia Productions for Neil Gaiman Presents at Audible.com–and won a 2013 Audie Award for Swordspoint. Other recent projects include the urban fantasy anthology Welcome to Bordertown (co-edited with Holly Black), and The Witches of Lublin, a musical audio drama written with Elizabeth Schwartz & Yale Strom (Gabriel, Gracie and Wilbur Awards).
Delia Sherman
Delia Sherman was born in Tokyo, Japan, and brought up in New York City. Delia’s short fiction for adults has appeared most recently in the anthologies Naked City and Queen Victoria’s Book of Spells. Stories for teen readers have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Steampunk! and Under My Hat. “CATNYP,” a story of a magical New York Between, inspired her first novel for children, Changeling. The sequel, The Magic Mirror of the Mermaid Queen, followed in 2009. The Freedom Maze, a time-travel fantasy set in Louisiana, was awarded the Norton Award, the Prometheus Award, and the Mythopoeic Award. Her recent collection of short fiction, Young Woman in a Garden, has appeared on PW’s list of Best SF of 2014. She has worked as a contributing editor for Tor Books and has co-edited the fantasy anthology The Horns of Elfland with Ellen Kushner and Donald G. Keller, as well as The Essential Bordertown with Terri Windling, as well as two anthologies of Interstitial fiction, Interfictions 1, with Theodora Goss and Interfictions 2, with Christopher Barzak. She is Executive Editor of Interfictions Online: A Journal of Interstitial Arts. (Photo by Austen Burroughs.)