The Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers' Workshop

Geoff Ryman

Canadian author Geoff Ryman has won 15 awards for his stories and ten books, many of which are science fiction. His novel Air (2005), won a John W. Campbell Memorial Award, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the James W Tiptree Memorial Award, the Canadian Sunburst Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award. It was also listed in The Guardian’s series ‘1000 Novels You Must Read’. In 2012 his novelette ‘What We Found’ won the Nebula Award in its category and his volume of short stories Paradise Tales won the Canadian Sunburst Award. Much of his work is based on travels to Cambodia such as ‘The Unconquered Country’ (1986), winner of the World Fantasy Award and British Science Fiction Association Award. His novel The King’s Last Song (2006) was set both in the Angkor Wat era and the time after Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. His other mainstream fiction includes Was (1992), a novel about the American West viewed through the history of The Wizard of Oz. His hypertext web novel 253: a novel for the Internet in Seven Cars and a Crash, in which 253 people sit on a London tube and are each described in 253 words, won the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award for best novel not published in hardback. The published Print Remix of the same novel (1998) is his most popular book. In 2011, Geoff Ryman won the Faculty Students’ Teaching Award for the School of Arts, History and Culture.

Larissa Lai

Larissa Lai has authored three novels, The Tiger Flu, Salt Fish Girl and When Fox Is a Thousand; two poetry collections, sybil unrest (with Rita Wong) and Automaton Biographies; a chapbook, Eggs in the Basement; and a critical book, Slanting I, Imagining We: Asian Canadian Literary Production in the 1980s and 1990s. Winner of a Lambda Literary Award and Tiptree Honor Book for The Tiger Flu, she has also received the Astraea Foundation Emerging Writers’ Award, and been a finalist for the Books in Canada First Novel Award, the Tiptree Award, the Sunburst Award, the City of Calgary W.O. Mitchell Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, the Dorothy Livesay Prize and the ACQL Gabrielle Roy Prize for Literary Criticism.

Larissa was born in La Jolla, California and grew up in St. John’s, Newfoundland. A practicing writer and cultural organizer, she did many interesting things through the 1980s and 1990s, including sitting on the organizing committee for Writing Thru Race, working as assistant curator for the contemporary media exhibit Yellow Peril: Reconsidered, working as coordinator at SAW Video (Ottawa), and curating two shows at the grunt gallery in Vancouver. She has been writer-in-residence at the University of Calgary, the University of Guelph and at Simon Fraser University, as well as guest professor at the University of Augsburg. At the University of British Columbia she served as Assistant Professor of Canadian Literature for seven years before relocating to the University of Calgary where she is currently Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of English. There, she directs The Insurgent Architects’ House for Creative Writing. She likes dogs, is afraid of cats, and feels at home in both Vancouver and Calgary.

Anjali Sachdeva

Anjali Sachdeva’s short story collection, All the Names They Used for God, was named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR, Refinery 29, and BookRiot, longlisted for the Story Prize, and chosen as the 2018 Fiction Book of the Year by the Reading Women podcast. The New York Times Book Review called the collection “strange and wonderful,” and Roxane Gay called it, “One of the best collections I’ve ever read. Every single story is a stand out.” Sachdeva is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has taught writing at the University of Iowa, Augustana College, and Carnegie Mellon University. She also worked for six years at the Creative Nonfiction Foundation, where she was Director of Educational Programs. She currently teaches at the University of Pittsburgh and in the MFA program at Randolph College. She has hiked through the backcountry of Canada, Iceland, Kenya, Mexico, and the United States, and spent much of her childhood reading fantasy novels and waiting to be whisked away to an alternate universe. Instead, she lives in Pittsburgh, which is pretty wonderful as far as places in this universe go.

Sam J. Miller

Sam J. Miller is the Nebula-Award-winning author of The Art of Starving (an NPR best of the year) and Blackfish City (a best book of the year for Vulture, The Washington Post, Barnes & Noble, and more – and a “Must Read” in Entertainment Weekly and O: The Oprah Winfrey Magazine). A recipient of the Shirley Jackson Award and the soon-to-be-renamed John M. Campbell Award, and a graduate of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, Sam’s short stories have been nominated for the World Fantasy, Theodore Sturgeon, and Locus Awards, and reprinted in dozens of anthologies. He lives in New York City, and at samjmiller.com.

Christopher Rowe

Christopher Rowe is the author of the acclaimed story collection, Telling the Map (Small Beer Press), as well as a middle grade series, the Supernormal Sleuthing Service, co-written with his wife, author Gwenda Bond. He has also published a couple of dozen stories, and been a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy and Theodore Sturgeon Awards. His work has been frequently reprinted, translated into a half-dozen languages around the world, and praised by the New York Times Book Review. His story “Another World For Map is Faith” made the long list in the 2007 Best American Short Stories volume, and his early fiction was collected in a chapbook, Bittersweet Creek and Other Stories, also by Small Beer Press. His most recent stories are “Jack of Coins” and “Knowledgeable Creatures” at Tor.com, selected by editor Ellen Datlow, and “Nowhere Fast” in Candlewick’s young adult anthology, Steampunk!, edited by Kelly Link and Gavin Grant.

He has an MFA from the Bluegrass Writers Workshop and lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with his wife and their many pets. Izzy the Dog, and Puck the Dog.

Gwenda Bond

Gwenda Bond is the New York Times bestselling author of many novels. Among others, they include the Lois Lane and Cirque American trilogies. She wrote the first official Stranger Things novel, Suspicious Minds. She and her husband author Christopher Rowe co-write a middle grade series, the Supernormal Sleuthing Service. She also created Dead Air, a serialized mystery and scripted podcast written with Carrie Ryan and Rachel Caine, and is a co-host of Cult Faves, a podcast about the weird world of cults and extreme belief.

Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Publishers Weekly, Locus Magazine, Salon, the Los Angeles Times, and many other publications. She has an MFA in writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in a hundred-year-old house in Lexington, Kentucky, with her husband and their unruly pets. There are rumors she escaped from a screwball comedy, and she might have a journalism degree because of her childhood love of Lois Lane. She writes a monthlyish letter you can sign up for at www.tinyletter.com/gwenda.

Shelley Streeby (Faculty Director)

Shelley Streeby, Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at UC San Diego, has been the Faculty Director of the Clarion Workshop since 2010. Professor Streeby received her Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Berkeley and her B.A. in English from Harvard University. Her books include Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism (UC Press), Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture (Duke University Press), and American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (University of California Press, American Crossroads Series, 2002), which received the American Studies Association’s 2003 Lora Romero First Book Publication Prize. She is also co-editor (with Jesse Alemán) of Empire and the Literature of Sensation: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Rutgers University Press, Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas Series, 2007).