How to Train Your ConFusion is happy to present our 2020 Guests of Honor!
Pro Guest of Honor: Kameron Hurley
Kameron Hurley is the author of The Light Brigade (March 2019), The Stars are Legion and the essay collection The Geek Feminist Revolution, as well as the award-winning God’s War Trilogy and The Worldbreaker Saga. Hurley has won the Hugo Award, Locus Award, Kitschy Award, and Sydney J. Bounds Award for Best Newcomer. She was also a finalist for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Nebula Award, and the Gemmell Morningstar Award. Her short fiction has appeared in Popular Science Magazine, Lightspeed and numerous anthologies. Hurley has also written for The Atlantic, Writers Digest, Entertainment Weekly, The Village Voice, LA Weekly, Bitch Magazine,and Locus Magazine. She posts regularly at KameronHurley.com.
Kameron’s Twitter: @KameronHurley
Kameron’s Instagram: Instagram.com/kameronhurley
Creative Guest of Honor: Brandon O’Brien
Brandon O’Brien (he/they) is a performance poet, science fiction and fantasy writer, media critic, teaching artist, and game designer living and working in Trinidad and Tobago. His short stories, essays and poetry has been published in in publications such as Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and sx salon, as well as anthologies such as Sunvault, Ride The Star Wind, and New Worlds, Old Ways.
His work is focused on using speculative lenses to reframe marginalized and Atlantic realities, imagine radical futures, and prescribe togetherness, awareness, and rebellion as forces for positive change leading into uncertain times.
Brandon O’Brien’s Twitter: @therisingtithes
Brandon O’Brien’s Instagram: Instagram.com/therisingtithes
Fan Guest of Honor: Bogi Takács
Bogi Takács is a Hungarian Jewish agender trans person (e/em/eir/emself or they pronouns) and a resident alien in the US. E is a winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year’s Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and a finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards.
Eir debut poetry collection Algorithmic Shapeshifting is out now from Aqueduct, and eir debut short story collection The Trans Space Octopus Congregation is coming Fall 2019 from Lethe Press.
Bogi’s Twitter: @bogiperson
Bogi’s Instagram: Instagram.com/bogiperson
Science Guest of Honor: Dr. Julie Lesnik
Julie Lesnik is a biological anthropologist and author of Edible Insects and Human Evolution (2018). As a world leader in the insects-as-food movement, Lesnik argues that this nutritious resource has been consumed by billions of people all over the world for millions of years. In 2016, as an advocate for the sustainability of cultivating insects for food, Lesnik organized and hosted the first U.S.-based conference dedicated to edible insects, bringing together over 200 people with representatives from a dozen countries. Lesnik is also an active public scholar, communicating her research to broader publics through countless talks and interviews, including podcasts such as Ologies and news sources such as National Geographic and NPR.
Julie’s Twitter: @JulieLesnik
Julie’s Instagram: Instagram.com/JulieLesnik