GAYLAXICON 2011 GUESTS

MELISSA CARTER (Special Media Guest) — Radio Host/Activist "The Bert Show" on Q100 in Atlanta, Co-Host of the Podcast "Pride in Between" and the nationally-syndicated show "Radio With A Twist" from 2006 until 2009.

DON SCHERMERHORN & WAYNE HERGENRODER (Fan Guests of Honor) —

Don Schermerhorn and Wayne Hergenroder have been together for 18 years as of April 3, 2010.  Wayne began gaming in 1984 and attended his first convention, MOBICON in Mobile, Alabama,  in 1987.  He attended MOBICON sporadically throughout the 1990's.  Don, who had been gaming since the age of 13,  didn't attend his first convention until MOBICON 1995.  Any of you who were at MOBICON 1995 might remember them as Vampire LARPers.  Wayne attended his first Dragon*Con in 1996 as part of RAVE - a White Wolf Vampire: the Masquerade demo group from Mobile.  Don couldn't go, much to Wayne's distress, but they finally were able to attend their first Dragon*Con together in 2000.  This trip peaked their interest in conventions.

Don heard of Crescent City Con (in New Orleans, LA) through friends who worked for the same company as he, and lived in the New Orleans area.  They decided to go.  At Crescent City Con XVI, they learned what conventions were all about:  meeting other Fans.  They met many people at that convention and think of many of those fans as close friends today.  One of these friends was a merchant.  Wayne and Don began traveling the convention circuit assisting her with her tables in dealer's rooms at such conventions as CoastCon, Crescent City Con, Vulcon-Atlanta, Fantasm, and Tenacity/Deep South Con I.

Exoticon 2001 began a new phase for them.  The chair of the convention, another close friend, needed help with panels and roped Don, Wayne, and good friend Andy into hosting a panels.  The panels they hosted were well received and heavily attended. This was the start of FLAMING FEN. Flaming Fen is a gay fan group that has hosted gay related programming and events at regional conventions including MOBICON, CoastCon, Crescent City Con, CoastCon Jr, Dragon*Con and Frolicon. 

After Exoticon, they began volunteering for more conventions. Wayne has been chair-person and/or assistant chair for the dealer's rooms of MOBICON, CoastCon (where he also served as Member-At-Large/Board Member), and Crescent City Con and is presently President of MOBICON the 13th, MOBICON, Inc.  He has also been Art Show Director or Assistant Director for MOBICON and CoastCon. He has also been guest and programming director for CoastCon. Don has run the hospitality suite for CoastCon and is presently Treasurer for MOBICON the 13th, MOBICON Inc.  He has been Merchant Room Director for CoastCon and has been guest and programming director for CoastCon and MOBICON. Together they have worked the Buffy-track at Dragon*Con.

Wayne and Don attended their first Galaxicon in 2007 and had a blast.  They have wanted to go to another one, but have not had the opportunity until now. They would like to thank Gaylaxicon/Outlantacon for the honor of being their first Fan Guests of Honour. 

CATHERINE LUNDOFF is the two-time Goldie Award-winning author of Night’s Kiss (Lethe Press, 2009) and Crave: Tales of Lust, Love and Longing (Lethe Press, 2007) as well as over 70 published stories. She is also the editor of Haunted Hearths and Sapphic Shades: Lesbian Ghost Stories (Lethe Press, 2008) and is the co-editor, with JoSelle Vanderhooft, of Hellebore and Rue: Tales of Queer Women and Magic (Drollerie Press, 2010). In her other lives, she's a professional computer geek and teaches writing classes at The Loft Literary Center.

Website: www.visi.com/~clundoff

EUGIE FOSTER calls home a mildly haunted, fey-infested house in metro Atlanta that she shares with her husband, Matthew, and her pet skunk, Hobkin. After receiving her master's degree in Psychology, she retired from academia and became a corporate computer drone. When her company asked her to leave the phantoms and fairies in the South and return to the dead-cold lands of the Midwest, she said "no" and retreated to her library to pen flights of fancy. Eugie's fiction has been translated into Greek, Hungarian, Polish, and French, and her publication credits number over 100.  They include stories in Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Cricket, Fantasy Magazine, Orson Scott Card's InterGalactic Medicine Show, and Jim Baen's Universe; podcasts Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and PodCastle; and anthologies Best New Fantasy (Prime Books), Heroes in Training (DAW Books), So Fey (Lethe Press), and Best New Romantic Fantasy 2 (Juno Books). Her short story collection, Returning My Sister's Face: And Other Far Eastern Tales of Whimsy and Malice, debuted in March, 2009, from Norilana Books. Visit her online at http://www.eugiefoster.com/.

WARREN ROCHELLE is a Professor of English at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia.  Born in Durham, NC, he grew up in nearby Chapel Hill.  He earned a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1977, followed by an MS in library science at Columbia University in 1978.  After eleven years as a school librarian, he returned to school to earn his MFA in 1991, followed by his PhD in 1997, both from UNC Greensboro.  He has published several articles on rhetoric and literature in Emergency Librarian, Extrapolation, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Foundation, SFRA Review, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, Paradoxa, and the North Carolina Literary Review.  His short fiction and poetry are published in Aboriginal Science Fiction, Beyond the Third Planet, Forbidden Lines, Coraddi, Crucible, The Charlotte Poetry Review, GW Magazine, the Asheville Poetry Review, the North Carolina Literary Review, and Romance and Beyond.  A critical book on the fiction of Ursula Le Guin, Communities of the Heart: the Rhetoric of Myth in the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, was published by Liverpool University Press in early 2001.  Golden Gryphon Press published his first novel, The Wild Boy, later in 2001, and his second novel, Harvest of Changelings, in 2007.  His third novel, The Called, the sequel to Harvest, was published in  2010.

KIERNAN KELLY's novels and short stories of gay erotic romance have hit bestseller status, with titles including Riding Heartbreak Road, Seti's Heart, In Bear Country, In Bear Country II: The Barbary Coast, In Their Own Skins: Shifting Sands, and Outland. She has also contributed to anthologies by Torquere Press, Starbooks Press, Aspen Mountain Press, Cleis Press, and MLR Press. Her short story print release, "Cletus," appears in Coscom Publishing's book Bits of the Dead, in the company of work by prestigious writer Piers Anthony. Kiernan's work envelops diverse themes, including paranormal, fantasy, and science fiction in addition to contemporary romance.

Recently, one of Kiernan fantasy stories, "Dancing on the Head of a Pin," won a place on the 2008 Gaylactic Spectrum Award List of Recommended Reads, sponsored by the Gaylactic Network and the Gaylactic Spectrum Awards Foundation.

www.KiernanKelly.com

KAYELLE ALLEN is the founder of Marketing for Romance Writers, an open and welcoming group for authors, agents, editors, publishers, author promotion services, and artists to share promotion secrets, ask questions, and hold free workshops. She's also a multipublished author whose worldbuilding skills include a broad sweep of ten-thousand years of future history, a feline language, and tradestandard laws for the empire where her books take place. Her writing captures you inside each hero's head and seduces you with what he feels and thinks. She thrusts you into the hero's heart and mind, teases you with his sexuality and sensual joys, and drags you onto the roller coaster with him when it plunges into the darkness of things-gone-wrong. When you and the hero get off the ride at the end, it's Kayelle's hope you'll be back in line when the next ride starts.

ANGELIA SPARROW—Angelia Sparrow is a librarian turned truck driver who lives in the mid-south, with her husband, four children and two cats. She has been writing GLBT fiction professionally since 2004 and has eight novels and more than fifty short stories to her credit, both alone and with co-author Naomi Brooks. Her husband is active in the local PFLAG and they both volunteer time and money to the local Gay & Lesbian Center and gay youth group.

Sabrina Pandora is a constant of the Atlanta nightlife, often seen at parties, clubs and events all over town.  She is a comedienne, an author, an instructor and emcee for conventions, events and burlesque shows, and her interests are as varied as the attendees of her famous Halloween parties.  She bills herself as a drag queen yet never performs as such, much to the confusion of those who understand the definitions associated with transgendered individuals.  Quick-witted, funny and always with a kind word or cutting remark, she has been described as "a guillotine with curves- pretty to look at but dangerous to play with". Sabrina Pandora lives in Atlanta with her partner Wendie and their two daschunds, Hansel und Gretel, whom she is confident will one day trip her into her own oven.

Additional Guests will be announced in time. Check back here or watch our Facebook group for further announcements!