Greg Bechtel

Greg Bechtel is a PhD candidate in English Literature at the University of Alberta, where he is completing his dissertation on Canadian syncretic fantasy —-a sub-genre of the fantastic roughly analogous to what is most commonly called contemporary fantasy. He is a regular presenter at the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, has published papers on fantasy theory and literature in English Studies in Canada and the Journal of the Fantastic of the Arts, and his SF-inflected fiction and non-fiction has appeared (or is forthcoming) in The Fiddlehead, On Spec, Prairie Fire, and the Tesseracts anthologies of Canadian speculative fiction. Currently, he is also the grateful recipient of a grant from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts in support of his first short story collection, which is tentatively titled Boundary Problems.

Dan Brodribb

Dan is a writer/stand-up comic/wrestling referee/crisis worker who practices both Buddhism and Salsa Dancing. He feels that he could probably use more practice with both.

Barb Galler-Smith

Author Barb Galler-Smith resides in Edmonton with her fabulously supportive husband, John, and two Yorkies, Darby and Sailor Moon.  She's a former Compuserve IMP, a member of Edmonton's Cult of Pain writers group, and a new groups of emerging writers called "the Scruffies".   She's also busy editing with OnSpec magazine where she gets to read lots and lots of stories. She terribly proud her recent novel DRUIDS, a collaboration with US Author Josh Langston, was nominated for 2010 Aurora Award for Best Novel in English.  The second book in the series in scheduled for Spring 2011.

Melissa Jacques

Amanda Lim

Amanda Lim is a graduate student in the Department of English at the University of Alberta. Although her main area of research is contemporary poetry, her secret fantasy is to teach a course devoted to science-fiction and to convert all her students into geeks. When not reading and writing about poetry, she is reading and trying to write fan fiction based on Star Trek and Stargate: Atlantis. She is still trying to decide whether she is a nerd, a geek, a dweeb, or some combination of the three, and is contemplating asking Wil Wheaton or David Hewlett for help.

Beatrice Nearey

Beatrice Nearey may tend to read Jane Austen rather than Sci-Fi, but on the other hand, she spent 20 years as a registered alien in the US, she married someone from Neptune, and her surname is almost the same as the main character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Furthermore, her father was a member of the Royal Astonomical Society and her mother was taught music by Gustav Holst who composed "The Planets". Beatrice is a past president of the Edmonton Jane Austen Society and a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She has organized local Jane Austen events, created a Jane Austen Game Show, written fan-fiction, adapted two Austen works as plays, and presented talks on Jane Austen's writings and times.

Robert J Sawyer

Science fiction writer and futurist Robert J. Sawyer has been interviewed over 250 times on radio, over 250 times on television, and countless times in print. He lives in Mississauga, Ontario (just outside Toronto). Rob is one of only seven writers in history — and the only Canadian — to win all three of the world's top Science Fiction awards for best novel of the year: the Hugo, the Nebula, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award.