We are going to have another stellar convention with a fantastic selection of activities and program items for everyone to enjoy. This year, we are looking forward to welcoming several new program participants as well as some returning favorites who have been away for far too long.

We’re still in the process of confirming program participants, but listed below is a sneak peek at some of our new and returning friends. Check out our full list of Boskone 56’s list of program participants, which is being updated daily.

Laurence Raphael Brothers
Laurence Raphael Brothers is a writer and technologist with five patents and a background in high-tech R&D, including work in AI, Telecom and Internet applications, and on-line gaming. He has published stories in such magazines as Nature, PodCastle, the New Haven Review, and Galaxy’s Edge. He is seeking representation for a WWI-era historical fantasy novel and a near-future military-aviation alien-invasion AI romance. Visit his webpage at https://laurencebrothers.com/ for links to more stories that can be read or listened to online, and follow him on twitter: @lbrothers.

S. A. Chakraborty
S. A. Chakraborty is a speculative fiction writer from New York City. Her debut, The City of Brass, was the first book in the Daevabad trilogy and has been short-listed for the Locus, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy awards. When not buried in books about Mughal miniatures and Abbasid political intrigue, she enjoys hiking, knitting, and recreating unnecessarily complicated medieval meals for her family. You can find her online at www.sachakraborty.com or on Twitter at @SChakrabooks where she likes to talk about history, politics, and Islamic art.

Brenda W. Clough
Brenda W. Clough spent much of her childhood overseas, courtesy of the U.S. government. Her first fantasy novel, The Crystal Crown, was published by DAW in 1984. She has also written The Dragon of Mishbil (1985), The Realm Beneath (1986), and The Name of the Sun (1988). Her children’s novel, An Impossumble Summer (1992), is set in her own house in Virginia, where she lives in a cottage at the edge of a forest. Her novel How Like a God, available from BVC, was published by Tor Books in 1997, and a sequel, Doors of Death and Life, was published in May 2000. Her latest novels from Book View Cafe include Revise the World (2009) and Speak to Our Desires. Her latest novel, A Most Dangerous Woman, is being serialized by Serial Box.

John Clute
John Clute has been reviewing science fiction and fantasy since 1964. He has also been working on the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction since 1975, recently passed the 6,666 solo entries marker. In addition, he has done other encyclopedias as well. John has assembled his reviews and criticism in several volumes, beginning with Strokes (1988); a new volume, and The Gaze of Attention: Reviews, due 2020. His SF novel is Appleseed (2001).

David B. Coe/D.B. Jackson
David B. Coe/D.B. Jackson is the author of twenty novels and as many short stories. As D.B. Jackson (http://www.DBJackson-Author.com), he is the author of Time’s Children (October 2018), the first book in The Islevale Cycle, a time travel/epic fantasy series from Angry Robot Books. He also writes the Thieftaker Chronicles, a series set in pre-Revolutionary Boston that combines elements of urban fantasy, mystery, and historical fiction. Under his own name (http://www.DavidBCoe.com) he has written the Crawford Award-winning LonTobyn Chronicle, the critically acclaimed Winds of the Forelands quintet and Blood of the Southlands trilogy, the novelization Ridley Scott’s, Robin Hood, and a contemporary urban fantasy series, the Case Files of Justis Fearsson. He is the co-author of How To Write Magical Words: A Writer’s Companion. He is currently working on several projects, including his next book for Angry Robot, his first editing endeavor, and a tie-in project with the History Channel. David has a Ph.D. in U.S. history from Stanford University. His books have been translated into a dozen languages.

Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ
Brother Guy Consolmagno SJ, is Director of the Vatican Observatory. His scientific research studies meteorites and asteroids. He is a native of Detroit, Michigan, received SM and SM degrees from MIT (where he served as MITSFS Skinner), and earned his PhD in Planetary Sciences from the University of Arizona in 1978. Along with more than 200 scientific publications, he is the author or co-author of several popular astronomy books including Turn Let at Orion (with Dan Davis, 5th edition, 2018) and Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial (with Paul Mueller, paperback edition 2018). In 2014 he received the Carl Sagan Medal from the American Astronomical Society Division for Planetary Sciences for excellence in public communication in planetary sciences.

Ellen Datlow
Ellen Datlow has been editing science fiction, fantasy, and horror short fiction for over thirty-five years as fiction editor of OMNI Magazine and editor of Event Horizon and SCIFICTION. She currently acquires short fiction for Tor.com. In addition, she has edited more than ninety science fiction, fantasy, and horror anthologies, including the annual The Best Horror of the Year, The Doll Collection, Black Feathers, Mad Hatters and March Hares, The Devil and the Deep: Horror Stories of the Sea, and The Best of the Best Horror of the Year. Forthcoming is Echoes: The Saga Anthology of Ghost Stories. She’s won multiple World Fantasy Awards, Locus Awards, Hugo Awards, Stoker Awards, International Horror Guild Awards, Shirley Jackson Awards, and the 2012 Il Posto Nero Black Spot Award for Excellence as Best Foreign Editor. Datlow was named recipient of the 2007 Karl Edward Wagner Award, given at the British Fantasy Convention for “outstanding contribution to the genre,” and has been honored with the Life Achievement Award by the Horror Writers Association and by the World Fantasy Convention. She lives in New York and co-hosts the monthly Fantastic Fiction Reading Series at KGB Bar. More information can be found at www.datlow.com, on Facebook, and on twitter as @EllenDatlow.

Sarah Beth Durst
Sarah Beth Durst is the award-winning author of seventeen fantasy books for adults, teens, and kids, including The Queens of Renthia series, Drink Slay Love, and The Stone Girl’s Story. She won an ALA Alex Award and a Mythopoeic Fantasy Award, and has been a finalist for SFWA’s Andre Norton Award three times. She is a graduate of Princeton University, where she spent four years studying English, writing about dragons, and wondering what the campus gargoyles would say if they could talk. Sarah lives in Stony Brook, New York, with her husband, her children, and her ill-mannered cat. For more information, visit her at sarahbethdurst.com.

Kate Elliott
Kate Elliott has been writing science fiction and fantasy fiction and non fiction for thirty years. Her twenty-seven books include her recent YA trilogy Court of Fives, the Afro-Celtic post-Roman alt-history fantasy adventure with lawyer dinosaurs the Spiritwalker trilogy (Cold Magic), the SF Novels of the Jaran, the Crossroads trilogy (Spirit Gate) & Black Wolves, and the massive AND complete seven volume epic fantasy Crown of Stars (King’s Dragon). Expect gender-bent Alexander the Great as space opera in 2019. Her work has been nominated for the Nebula, World Fantasy, RT, Norton, and Locus Awards. Kate was born in Iowa, raised in Oregon, and now lives in Hawaii, where she paddles outrigger canoes and spoils her schnauzer, Fingolfin, High King of the Schnoldor (Finn for short).

Leigh Grossman
Leigh Grossman (www.swordsmith.com @SwordsmithLRG) is a writer, college lecturer, editor, and publishing consultant. He teaches in the English Department at the University of Connecticut and does typesetting, book development, and book production for various publishers and authors via his company, Swordsmith Productions. Grossman is the author of sixteen published books, most recently fantasy novel The Lost Daughters. He compiled and edited Sense of Wonder, the largest single-volume science fiction anthology ever produced.

Nicholas Kaufmann
Nicholas Kaufmann is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated, Thriller Award-nominated, and Shirley Jackson Award-nominated author of two collections and six novels, the most recent of which is the horror novel 100 Fathoms Below (2018, Blackstone Publishing). His short fiction has appeared in Cemetery Dance, Black Static, Nightmare Magazine, Dark Discoveries, and others. In addition to his own original work, he has written for such properties as Zombies vs. Robots and The Rocketeer. He and his wife live in Brooklyn, New York.

Mur Lafferty
Mur Lafferty is a Hugo and Nebula nominated writer, most recently of Six Wakes and Solo: A Star Wars Story. She’s also known for being a Hugo winning and Hall of Fame podcaster and co-host and producer of Ditch Diggers and I Should Be Writing. She’s the co-editor of the science fiction podcast Escape Pod, nominee for the Best Semiprozine Hugo Award in 2018.

Fonda Lee
Fonda Lee is the award-winning author of the Green Bone Saga, the genre-blending gangster fantasy series beginning with Jade City (Orbit) and continuing in Jade War, which releases in May of 2019. She is also the author of the acclaimed young adult science fiction novels Zeroboxer (Flux), Exo and Cross Fire (Scholastic). Fonda’s work has been nominated for the Nebula, Andre Norton, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards, and she won the Aurora Award, Canada’s national science fiction and fantasy award, twice in the same year for Best Novel and Best Young Adult Novel. Fonda is a recovering corporate strategist, black belt martial artist, and an action movie aficionado residing in Portland, Oregon. She can be found online at www.fondalee.com and on Twitter @fondajlee.

Charles Stross
Charles Stross, 54, is a full-time science fiction writer and resident of Edinburgh, Scotland. A former Boskone guest of honor and the author of seven Hugo-nominated novels and winner of three Hugo awards for best novella, Stross’s works have been translated into over twelve languages. His most recent novel, The Labyrinth Index, was published by Tor.com in October 2018; his next novel, “Invisible Sun” is due out from Tor in late 2019.

Tonia Thompson
Tonia Thompson is the creator and executive producer of Nightlight, a horror podcast featuring creepy tales from Black writers. Tonia has been writing horror since the second grade, much to the dismay of the teachers in her rural East Texas community. She is currently working on her first audio drama series, described as a podcast version of American Horror Story meets Superstition. Tonia tells horror stories regularly on Twitter, and in her spare time, she loves to hike, but normally chooses to sleep in instead. She lives in Texas with her husband and son, but dreams of living in Colorado, especially in the summer.

Cadwell Turnbull
Cadwell Turnbull is a graduate from the North Carolina State University’s Creative Writing MFA in Fiction and English MA in Linguistics. He attended Clarion West 2016. His debut novel, The Lesson, set in near-future U.S. Virgin Islands after an alien colonization, is forthcoming from Blackstone Publishing. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and Asimov’s Science Fiction. His short story “Loneliness is in Your Blood” was selected for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018. His novelette “Other Worlds and This One” was also selected as notable story by the anthology.

Come see this fantastic group of authors along with over 150 other authors, artists, scientists, engineers, musicians, creators, publishing professionals, and more!