A Peak at the Fabulous Keynote Speakers for PPWC 2018

Boy, do we have some fantastic keynote speakers coming in 2018!  I’m so amazed at the selection of talent, well-known authors that have agreed to share their knowledge of the writing business with you.  You don’t want to miss this conference.  Registration opens on November 11, 2017.

The well-known, New York Times best-selling author Jim Butcher will be our Saturday night keynote speaker.   He’s the author of the well-known series, The Dresden Files, The Codex Alera and his new steampunk series, the Cinder Spires.    He also writes graphic novels and recently won two Dragon Awards at DragonCon: Best Graphic Novel for “Wild Card” and Best Comic Book for “Dog Men.”  A dedicated gamer, he also developed the Dresden Files Cooperative Card game based on his Dresden Files series.

Laurell Kaye Hamilton  is an American fantasy and romance writer. She is best known as the author of two series of stories.  Her New York Times-bestselling Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series centers on Anita Blake, a professional zombie raiser, vampire executioner and supernatural consultant for the police, which includes novels, short story collections, and comic books. Six million copies of Anita Blake novels are in print. Her Merry Gentry series centers on Meredith Gentry, Princess of the Unseelie court of Faerie, a private detective facing repeated assassination attempts.  Her Anita Blake books have also been turned in a series of comic books.

Jonathan Maberry is a New York Times best-selling and multiple Bram Stoker Award-winning suspense author, editor, comic book writer, magazine feature writer, playwright, content creator and writing teacher/lecturer, who writes in a variety of genres.  His young adult fiction includes Rot & Ruin (2011) in now in development for film.   His mystery novels include the upcoming Dylan Quinn mystery-thriller series for teens and the NIGHTSIDERS series of middle-grade horror/sci-fi adventures, which debuted in 2015.  His horror novels include The Pine Deep Trilogy from Pinnacle Books, which won the Bram Stoker Award for Best First Novel and named one of the 25 Best Horror Novels of the New Millennium.   He was named one of the Today’s Top Ten Horror Writers. His books have been sold to more than two-dozen countries.

Hugo-award winning author, Mary Robinette Kowal is a novelist and professional puppeteer. Her debut novel, Shades of Milk and Honey, a story of magic in Regency England, (Tor 2010) was nominated for the 2010 Nebula Award for Best Novel. In 2008 she won the Campbell Award for Best New Writer, while three of her short fiction works have been nominated for the Hugo Award: “Evil Robot Monkey” in 2009 and “For Want of a Nail” in 2011, which won the Hugo for short story that year. Her stories have appeared in Strange Horizons, Asimov’s, and several Year’s Best anthologies, as well as in her collection Scenting the Dark and Other Stories from Subterranean Press.