Your Personal Odyssey 2023 Guest Critiquers
Scott H. Andrews lives in Virginia with his wife, two cats, twelve guitars, a dozen overflowing bookcases, and hundreds of beer bottles from all over the world. He writes, teaches college chemistry, and is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of the nine-time Hugo Award finalist and World Fantasy Award-winning online fantasy magazine Beneath Ceaseless Skies.
Scott is a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop; his literary short fiction has won a $1000 prize from the Briar Cliff Review, and his genre short fiction has appeared in Space & Time, Crossed Genres, and Ann VanderMeer's Weird Tales.
Scott has taught writing at the Odyssey Workshop, Writefest, and online for Odyssey Online Classes, Clarion West, and Cat Rambo Academy for Wayward Writers. He has lectured on short fiction, secondary-world fantasy, editing, magazine publishing, audio podcasting, and beer on dozens of convention panels at multiple Worldcons, World Fantasy conventions, and regional conventions in the Northeast and Midwest. He is an eight-time finalist and 2019 winner of the World Fantasy Award, and he celebrates International Stout Day at least once a year.
Neil Clarke is best known as the editor and publisher of the Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning Clarkesworld Magazine. Launched in October 2006, the online magazine has been a finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Semiprozine four times (winning three times), the World Fantasy Award four times (winning once), and the British Fantasy Award once (winning once). Neil is also a nine-time finalist for the Hugo Award for Best Editor-Short Form, three-time winner of the Chesley Award for Best Art Director, and recipient of the 2019 Solstice Award from SFWA. In the thirteen years since Clarkesworld Magazine launched, numerous stories that he has published have been nominated for or won the Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Sturgeon, Locus, BSFA, Shirley Jackson, WSFA Small Press, and Stoker Awards.
In 2012, Neil suffered a near-fatal heart attack while attending Readercon in Burlington, MA. The damage sustained in this incident later required that he undergo surgery for the implantation of a defibrillator. These events inspired both Upgraded, his 2014 cyborg anthology and his 2017 jump from his day job in academia (technology) to become a full-time editor.
Additionally, Neil edits Forever—a digital-only, reprint science fiction magazine he launched in 2015. His anthologies include: Upgraded, Galactic Empires, Touchable Unreality, More Human than Human, The Final Frontier, Not One of Us, The Eagle has Landed, and the Best Science Fiction of the Year series. His next anthology, The Best Science Fiction of the Year: Volume 6, will be published this November.
He currently lives in New Jersey with his wife and two sons.
Carrie Vaughn's work includes the Philip K. Dick Award-winning novel Bannerless, a post-apocalyptic murder mystery; the New York Times Bestselling Kitty Norville urban fantasy series; over twenty novels and upwards of 100 short stories, two of which have been finalists for the Hugo Award. Her most recent novel is Questland, about a high-tech LARP that goes horribly wrong. She's a contributor to the Wild Cards series of shared world superhero books edited by George R. R. Martin and a graduate of the Odyssey Writing Workshop. An Air Force brat, she survived her nomadic childhood and managed to put down roots in Boulder, Colorado. Visit her at www.carrievaughn.com.
Lynda E. Rucker grew up writing stories in a house in the woods full of books and cats in the southeastern U.S. and has gone on to live and travel in a number of different countries throughout the world. In 1996, she attended the first-ever Odyssey workshop in New Hampshire. She has sold more than 50 short stories to various magazines and anthologies including Best New Horror, The Best Horror of the Year, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, Black Static, Nightmare, F&SF, Postscripts and Shadows and Tall Trees among others. She has had a short play produced as part of an anthology of horror plays on London's West End, has collaborated on a short horror comic, and was a regular columnist for the UK horror magazine Black Static for nearly a decade. In 2015, she won the Shirley Jackson Award for Best Short Story, and she served as a juror for the 2018 awards. Her first collection, The Moon Will Look Strange, was released in 2013 from Karōshi Books and reprinted as a limited edition by Undertow Publications in 2018. Her second, You'll Know When You Get There, was published by the Dublin-based Swan River Press in 2016. In 2018, she edited the anthology Uncertainties III for Swan River Press. Her third collection of short fiction, Now It’s Dark, will be released from Swan River Press in 2023. She’s taught English and writing in a number of different settings and loves working with students to improve their skills.
Kate Alice Marshall writes horror and thrillers for all ages, from middle grade to adult. Her YA debut I Am Still Alive, nominated for the Washington State Book Award, was hailed as a "tense wire of a novel" by the New York Times and optioned for film by Universal, while her supernatural young adult thriller Rules for Vanishing was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award and has a TV adaptation in development. Her Eden Eld series, beginning with Thirteens, brings magic and scares to the middle grade audience, and her debut adult thriller, What Lies in the Woods, is forthcoming in 2023.
Her short fiction has appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies, The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror, and The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy. As Kathleen Kimmel, she published historical romance with Berkley.
Kate has been a dedicated writer since childhood, and attended the Odyssey Writing Workshop in 2005, which was instrumental in developing her craft and shaping her writing career. Since then, she's written video game dialog, retail copy, RPGs, and books in entirely too many genres. She now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her family, her dogs Octavia and Vonnegut, and an increasingly unruly garden. You can find more about her books at katemarshallbooks.com.
Arley Sorg is co-Editor-in-Chief at Fantasy Magazine and a 2022 recipient of SFWA's Kate Wilhelm Solstice Award. He is also a 2021 and 2022 World Fantasy Award Finalist, a 2022 Locus Award Finalist, and a finalist for two 2022 Ignyte Awards: for his work as a critic as well as for his creative nonfiction. Arley is senior editor at Locus Magazine, associate editor at both Lightspeed & Nightmare, and a columnist for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. He takes on multiple roles, including slush reader, movie reviewer, and book reviewer, and conducts interviews for multiple venues, including Clarkesworld Magazine and his own site: arleysorg.com. He has been a guest speaker at a range of events, and has taught classes and run workshops for Clarion West, Augur Magazine, Cascade Writers, and more. He is a guest critiquer at the Odyssey Writing Workshop and is the week 5 instructor for the 2023 Clarion West course. Arley grew up in England, Hawaii, and Colorado, and studied Asian Religions at Pitzer College. He lives in the SF Bay Area and writes in local coffee shops when he can. Find him on Twitter @arleysorg. Arley is a 2014 Odyssey Writing Workshop graduate.
Jeanne Cavelos - Director and Primary Instructor
The creation of the Odyssey Writing Workshops Charitable Trust, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization devoted to helping developing writers of fantastic fiction improve their work, has been a dream of Jeanne’s which she has worked to make a reality.
Jeanne is a writer, editor, scientist, and teacher. She began her professional life as an astrophysicist and mathematician, teaching astronomy at Michigan State University and Cornell University, and working in the Astronaut Training Division at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.
But soon her love of science fiction led her to earn her MFA in creative writing. She moved into a career in publishing, becoming a senior editor at Bantam Doubleday Dell, where she created and launched the Abyss imprint of innovative horror and the Cutting Edge imprint of noir literary fiction. She also ran the science fiction/fantasy publishing program. In addition, she edited a wide range of fiction and nonfiction. She worked with such authors as William F. Nolan, Joan Vinge, Robert Anton Wilson, Dennis Etchison, Tanith Lee, Kathe Koja, Poppy Z. Brite, J. M. Dillard, David Wingrove, Barry Gifford, Patrick McCabe, and Peter Dickinson. In her eight years in New York publishing, she edited numerous award-winning and best-selling authors and gained a reputation for discovering and nurturing new writers. Jeanne won the World Fantasy Award for her editing.
Jeanne left New York to find a balance that would allow her to do her own writing and work in a more in-depth way with writers.
Jeanne has had seven books published by major publishers. Her last novel to hit the stores was Invoking Darkness, the third volume in her best-selling trilogy The Passing of the Techno-Mages (Del Rey), set in the Babylon 5 universe. The Sci-Fi Channel called the trilogy “A revelation for Babylon 5 fans. . . . Not ‘television episodic’ in look and feel. They are truly novels in their own right.” Her book The Science of Star Wars (St. Martin’s) was chosen by the New York Public Library for its recommended reading list. The Science of The X-Files (Berkley) was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. Jeanne is currently writing a near-future science thriller about genetic manipulation, titled Fatal Spiral.
Jeanne has published short fiction and nonfiction in many magazines and anthologies. She has also ghostwritten several bestselling books.
The Many Faces of Van Helsing (Berkley), an anthology edited by Jeanne, was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award. The editors at Barnes and Noble called it “brilliant. . . . Arguably the strongest collection of supernatural stories to be released in years.”
Since she loves working with developing writers, Jeanne created and serves as primary instructor at Your Personal Odyssey Writing Workshop, an innovative program that combines advanced lectures, expert feedback, and deep mentoring, and provides a personalized, one-on-one online experience responsive to each writer’s needs. In 2010, Jeanne launched Odyssey Online Classes to help writers all over the world improve their skills in specific, targeted areas. Jeanne oversees the courses offered and teaches every few years. In 2015, Jeanne was nominated for a World Fantasy Award for her work as Odyssey director and instructor.
She is also an English lecturer at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire, where she teaches fiction writing.
Jeanne has spoken widely on writing, publishing, science, and science fiction at venues as varied as the Smithsonian Institute, the Air Force Revolutionary Technologies Division, the Intel International Science Fair, the American Chemical Society, Dartmouth College, the Discovery Channel, the History Channel, the Science Channel, Turner Entertainment, the Art Bell radio program, and many radio shows, bookstores, and conventions. More information is on her site, www.jeannecavelos.com.