CoreCon Guests

S.M. Stirling was born in France in 1953, to Canadian parents -- although his mother was born in England and grew up in Peru. After that he lived in Europe, Canada, Africa, and the US and visited several other continents. He graduated from law school in Canada but had his dorsal fin surgically removed, and published his first novel (SNOWBROTHER) in 1984, going full-time as a writer in 1988, the year of his marriage to Janet Moore of Milford, Massachusetts, who he met, wooed and proposed to at successive World Fantasy Conventions. In 1995 he suddenly realized that he could live anywhere and they decamped from Toronto, that large, cold, gray city on Lake Ontario, and moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. He became an American citizen in 2004. His latest books are THE COUNCIL OF SHADOWS (May 2011) and THE TEARS OF THE SUN (Sept. 2011), from Roc/Penguin. His hobbies mostly involve reading -- history, anthropology, archaeology, and travel, besides fiction -- but he also cooks and bakes for fun and food. For twenty years he also pursued the martial arts, until hyperextension injuries convinced him he was in danger of becoming the most deadly cripple in human history. Currently he lives with Janet and the compulsory authorial cats.

Lovern Kindzierski has been recognized by the Comic Buyer's Guide survey as one of comics' most influential colourists of all time. He has designed colour for every major publisher in the industry and been nominated several times as Best Colourist for both the Eisner and Harvey Awards. Lovern won a Wizard Fan Award for his work in 1993 and 1994 as well as a Comic Buyer's Fan Award in 1998. His interests in the comics medium have lead him to explore many aspects of the industry. His ability as a writer has been utilized by several principal publishers. Lovern's first published writing in the comic industry was a short story in the Marvel Comics "Within Our Reach" anthology, entitled "So This is Christmas". Since then Lovern has gone on to script the series "Agents of Law" for Dark Horse Comics, then helped recreate the character "Lunatik" for Marvel. In 1997 he wrote six issues of the ongoing "Tarzan" series for Dark Horse, which got him nominated for Best Writer at the following Harvey Awards. After completing his Tarzan work, Lovern was invited to write "The Victorian" series for Penny Farthing Press. Following that, he wrote a series of stories in the tradition of the Arabian Nights for Heavy Metal magazine. These stories have been collected in an album, "Demon Wind", and are now distributed by Heavy Metal in the United States and by Norma Publishing in Europe. Lovern is presently the writer of the Shame trilogy for Renegade Arts Publishing.