CrossingsCon is proud to welcome our guests of honor for 2022!

If you’re not familiar with the works of some of our guests, our staff put together a guide on where to start with each of their respective bibliographies, including some reviews. Take a look at it here!

A picture of Diane Duane
Diane Duane

Appearing in person at CrossingsCon now for the fourth time, is the one and only Diane Duane! Diane is now in her fourth decade as a writer of science fiction and fantasy. She is the creator of the Young Wizards YA science fantasy series (now up to volume 10) and the Middle Kingdoms LGBTQ adult-fantasy series (three main-sequence novels and various long and short interstitial fiction), and has also worked in comics and computer games. She has also written extensively for television and film, working with characters ranging from Jean-Luc Picard to Batman and from Siegfried the Volsung to Scooby-Doo. She has picked up various awards for her prose and screen work over time, the most recent of these being the Faust Grandmaster Award from the International Association of Media Tie-In Writers. She also served as a writer guest of honor at the World Science Fiction Convention in Dublin in 2019.

Born and raised in the New York suburbs, DD lived and worked in Manhattan, Philadelphia, and the Los Angeles area before finally relocating to Europe in 1987 and Ireland in 1988. She has lived there ever since with her husband of more than thirty years, the novelist and screenwriter Peter Morwood. From an unusually device-heavy cottage in the foothills of the Wicklow Mountains they casually pursue total galactic domination and the perfect home-baked loaf of bread, with the occasional trip to the Continent for long dining-car lunches and business meetings in the Alps with the Transcendent Pig.

DD’s favorite color is blue, her favorite food is a weird Swiss scrambled-potato dish called maluns, and her sign is RUNWAY 22R: HOLD FOR CLEARANCE.

Follow Diane on her website or her blog, Out of Ambit.

A picture of Mark Oshiro
Mark Oshiro

Making their fourth appearance at CrossingsCon is Mark Oshiro, the award-winning author of Anger is a Gift, which was a finalist in the 31st Annual Lambda Literary Awards for LGBTQ YA and a winner of the Schneider Family Book Award in 2019. Their upcoming books are a YA Fantasy, Each of Us A Desert, and their middle grade debut, The Insiders. When they are not writing, they run the online Mark Does Stuff universe and are trying to pet every dog in the world.

We are so excited to have Mark Oshiro return for CrossingsCon 2022! Find Mark on their website or the places where Mark Does Stuff.

Photo courtesy of Zoraida Cordova

A picture of Megan Whalen Turner
Megan Whalen Turner

Megan is an award winning and NYT bestselling author of fantasy for children, adults and young adults. Her novel, The Thief was a Newbery Honor book in 1997. It was the first of six books set in the world of the Queen’s Thief. Turner has been awarded a Horn Book Honor, been shortlisted twice for the Norton Award and won both the Mythopoeic Award and the LA Times Book Award for Young Adult Literature. Satisfying for all ages, her books are filled with political machinations and divine intervention, friendship, fortitude and deceit. It is a testament to their staying power that twenty five years after The Thief was published, readers were eagerly awaiting the arrival of Return of the Thief in October 2020. You can find her online at www.meganwhalenturner.org

A picture of Ursula Vernon
Ursula Vernon

Ursula Vernon, author and illustrator, has written over fifteen books for children, several novels for adults, an epic webcomic called Digger and various short stories. She publishes children’s books under her own name and adult books under the pen name T. Kingfisher. She has received numerous awards, including the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for her work in various mediums. Having moved across the country several times, she eventually settled in Pittsboro, North Carolina, where she works full-time as an artist, writer, and creator of oddities.

We could not be happier to have Ursula join us for CrossingsCon 2022! You can find Ursula’s blog and more about her and her works on her website.

A picture of Kate Howells
Kate Howells

Kate Howells is the author of Space is Cool as Fuck, member of the Government of Canada’s Space Advisory Board and Global Community Outreach Manager at The Planetary Society, an organization that aims to empower people all around the world to become involved in advancing space exploration.

Kate Howells works with The Planetary Society to build and manage a global network of volunteers who do educational outreach in their communities, and to develop volunteer activities that support The Planetary Society’s goals and vision. Kate also leads the development of the Society’s youth education program. Based in Montreal, Kate represents The Planetary Society in Canada and leads the development of advocacy and outreach work there, and is pursuing a Master of Arts in Educational Studies at Concordia University.

We are super excited to have Kate attend CrossingsCon 2019! You can read more about her here.

A picture of Seanan McGuire
Seanan McGuire

Seanan McGuire is an American author, and the vanguard of an invading race of alien plant people which will soon arrive to darken the skies of this world. She is very sorry about any trouble this may cause. While waiting for the invasion, she writes books (an average of five to seven per year, which is ridiculous), watches a lot of horror movies, and spends far too much time playing with her abnormally large Maine Coon cats. They’re enormous.

Seanan enjoys travel, and is really looking forward to seeing you all at CrossingsCon, where she will probably figure out something ridiculous to do in a local swamp. Because that’s just the sort of person she is.

Take a look at her website, Tumblr, LiveJournal, or Twitter!