ROUND venue
Hosted by Sandra Kasturi
Authors reading:
Chadwick Ginther is the Prix Aurora Award-nominated author of Graveyard Mind (ChiZine Publications) and the Thunder Road Trilogy (Ravenstone Books). His short fiction has appeared recently in Earth: Giants, Golems, & Gargoyles, Over the Rainbow: Folk and Fairy Tales from the Margins, and Abyss & Apex. He lives and writes in Winnipeg, Canada, spinning sagas set in the wild spaces of Canada’s western wilderness where surely monsters must exist.
Armed with an English degree from Ripon College and an MBA from Chicago’s Stuart School of Business, Blake Hausladen has thrived for over two decades in the shadowed back-office realms of the financial industry. After gradate school and a seven year run as Chief Compliance Officer for a Chicago-based hedge fund, Blake was a founding member of two high-tech startup firms that specialized in the surveillance and investigation of electronic communication and trade order records for leading banks and energy trading firms. He can most easily be found at literary conventions, hand-selling hardcovers to strangers, hosting writing workshops and Beer and Books parties. He currently solves financial crimes in Chicago during the day and gives life to wild fantasies during the blackest hours of night.
Michael Rowe was born in Ottawa, and has lived in Beirut, Havana, and Paris. He is the author of the novels Enter, Night (2011), Wild Fell (2013), and October (2019), all from ChiZine Publications. A French edition of Wild Fell was published by Editions Bragelonne in Paris in 2016. An award-winning journalist and essayist, he is also the author of the nonfiction books Writing Below the Belt (1995), Looking For Brothers (1999), and Other Men's Sons (2004). He has won the Lambda Literary Award, the Queer Horror Award, and the Randy Shilts Award for Nonfiction. He has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award, the International Horror Guild Award, the Sunburst Award, and the Shirley Jackson Award. He was for 17 years a first-tier correspondent for the legendary horror film magazine Fangoria, which he credits as the best job he ever had. As the creator and editor of the anthologies Queer Fear (2000) and Queer Fear 2 (2002), Clive Barker hailed him in as having "changed forever the shape of horror fiction."
Deanna Sjolander graduated in 2004 with a Masters in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University and has been writing and editing since. She is an active (and past) committee member for several Science-fiction/Fantasy conventions and Committee Lead/Fundraising Chair for In Your Write Mind Workshop in partnership with Seton Hill University. She does both freelance editing and voice work in her spare time. Deanna is outlining and researching several writing and podcasts projects.
Music:
KARI MAAREN is as the sparrow's flight through the mead hall, metaphorically speaking. The author of Copper Cylinder-winning Weave a Circle Round, the composer of songs about terrible elves and problematic movie trailers, the creator of time-travel comics that are read by almost six people, Kari is nearly always trying not to mark. She probably doesn't like your shoes.
NOTE that the Round Venue is not currently accessible--it is on the second floor, up a flight of stairs.