Nancy Kress
NANCY KRESS is the author of thirty-six books, including twenty-eight novels, four collections of short stories, three books on writing, and over 100 short stories. Her work has won six Nebulas, two Hugos, a Sturgeon, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Nancy’s most recent work is Observer (Story Plant, January 2023), co-written with Dr. Robert Lanza. Her work has been translated into two dozen languages, including Swedish, Danish, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Polish, Croatian, Chinese, Lithuanian, Romanian, Japanese, Korean, Hebrew, Russian, Hungarian, and Klingon, none of which she can read.
In addition to writing, Nancy often teaches at various venues around the country and abroad, including teaching each Clarion several times, a semester as Picador visiting lecturer at the University of Leipzig, and a week-long writing workshop in Beijing. Plus, of course, Taos Toolbox with Walter Jon Williams!
Walter Jon Williams
Walter Jon Williams is a New York Times and London Timesbestselling author, and the author of Hardwired, City on Fire, and The Praxis. He has written 42 volumes of fiction in over 40 years, as well as being nominated for ten Nebula Awards, six Hugo Awards, the World Fantasy Award, and the Philip K Dick Award. He has also written for movies, television, and the gaming field.
He has participated in the Sycamore Hill and Franklinia workshops, as well as being a founding member of the Very Small Array and Critical Mass workshops. He is the founder of the Rio Hondo professional workshop in Taos, as well as the founder of Taos Toolbox, the workshop for new writers.
“Walter good. Monsters bad.” (Ian Tregillis, Clarion 2005)
Daniel Abraham
Special Guest
Daniel Abraham is a Hugo award-winning and NYT bestselling novelist, comic book writer, screenwriter, and television producer. His best known work includes The Expanse (written as James SA Corey with Ty Franck), the Long Price Quartet, The Dagger and the Coin series, and the graphic novel adaptations of George RR Martin’s Game of Thrones.
Ty Frank
co-creator of The Expanse
(Bio to follow)
Jeffe Kennedy
Special Lecturer
Jeffe Kennedy™ is a multi-award-winning and best-selling author of 65 published titles, primarily in epic fantasy romance. She is the current President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA). She is best known for her RITA® Award-winning novel, The Pages of the Mind, the recent trilogy, The Forgotten Empires, and the wildly popular, Dark Wizard. She recently signed a six-figure deal with Tor, with the first book forthcoming in June 2025. Jeffe lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is represented by Sarah Younger of Nancy Yost Literary Agency.
Diana Rowland
Special Lecturer
Diana Rowland lived the first fifty-five years of her life below the Mason-Dixon line, and therefore uses “y’all” for second-person-plural, as is right and good.
She’s worked as a blackjack dealer, a street cop, a detective, a computer forensics specialist, a crime scene investigator, and an autopsy tech, which means she’s seen (and smelled) plenty of weird crap. She won the marksmanship award in her Police Academy class, has a 2nd degree black belt in Hapkido, has handled numerous dead bodies in various states of decomposition, and totally sucks at rollerblading. She has also written a bunch of novels and some short stories, a handful of which won some cool awards.
She recently relocated from south Louisiana to Albuquerque, where she’s deeply grateful for the absence of humidity and hurricanes.