We're privileged to have found 18 authors whose work we wanted to include. They run the gamut from first-timers to multiple award winners, and include philosopher of mind, a literature professor, a biologist, a chemist-turned-agriculturalist, a graphic designer, a web geek, and even a few writers, among other professions.
Here are our authors, in alphabetic order.
Steve Carper was born and raised in Rochester, fortuitously one of the most literate cities in the country. He went to school here, worked in City Hall, studied Rochester history, and has walked every inch of the Genesee River trails inside the city limits. His house, also inside city limits, is shared with his remarkably forbearing and supportive wife Linda and with 10,000 books or about a billion words of prose, 0.1% of which he’s written. A collection of his f&sf short stories, Tyrannosaur Faire (http://www.tyrannosaurfaire.com), appeared in 2008. His next sf project is the editorship of the SFWA Handbook, a compendium of articles on the business of being an sf writer.
Sally Caves is the nom de plume of Professor Sarah Higley at the University of Rochester, where she teaches Medieval Studies, Film and Creative Writing. She sold her first story, a teleplay called “Hollow Pursuits,” to Paramount, which aired in 1991 on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and she co-authored the teleplay “Babel” for Deep Space Nine. She has fiction and poetry publications in Fantasy and Science Fiction, Terra Incognita, HazMat Review, and the on-line magazine Bathhouse. “Fetch Felix,” a novelette, was given honorable mention in the The Best Horror and Fantasy of 1991 and “In the Second Person” was short-listed for the James Tiptree, Jr. Award. She is also author of three academic books: one on Old English and Early Welsh Poetry, an anthology of essays on The Blair Witch Project, and a third on Hildegard of Bingen’s “Unknown Language.”
Sally’s favorite places in Rochester are the Rush Rhees Library at the University of Rochester and High Falls. Visit http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/ to learn more about her.
Ben Chapman is a research health psychologist at the University of Rochester Medical Center. Born and raised in Normal, Illinois, he arrived in Rochester in the fall of 2005 after six years of graduate work in the Dallas area and a one- year stop-over in Kansas City. He enjoys historical fiction, thrillers, alternate history, slip-stream and other boundary-blurring speculative fiction, and mysteries. His own writing tends towards light-hearted spoofs of many varieties, and, lately, toward alternate history. His day job involves trying to figure out how and why people do what they do for hedons. When not occupied with that, he tries to maximize his own hedonic levels through running, working out, attempting with varying degrees of success to cook healthy and tasty food, and spending time with friends. He is a regular member the D309 East novel group, and of Nancy Kress’s classes at Writers and Books—one of his favorite places in Rochester, which happens to be next door to Starry Nights, another of his favorite places.
Adele Ciccaglione is currently a senior at East High School. One of her favorite places in Rochester is Cobb’s Hill Park.
Craig DeLancey lives in Fairport, pays the bills teaching philosophy, and writes plays and speculative fiction. He likes to hang at The Spot, Starry Nights, Spin, Geva (which has staged readins of two of his plays), 2Vine, The Little, and the MAG. His web site is http://www.craigdelancey.com/.
Nick DiChario has been an active member of the Rochester writing scene for more than twenty years. He is the fiction editor of HazMat Review, Rochester’s independent literary magazine (http://www.hmlr.org). Nick has been nominated for several writing awards and he is the author of two published novels, A Small and Remarkable Life (2006) and Valley of Day-Glo (2008). For more info about Nick visit http://www.NickDiChario.com.
Nick’s laments that his favorite place in Rochester no longer exists: ”The Atlantic Tavern, once located near the corner of Atlantic and University, was for thirty years one of the most vibrant and colorful establishments in Rochester, where bikers and writers would hang out together drinking beer, shooting pool, blasting the juke, and talking books and Harleys with an abandon that even Charles Bukowski would have admired. The Atlantic was always grimy and smelled of gasoline and greasy cheeseburgers and had no decor to speak of. It was freezing cold in the winter and a sweltering sweat-box in the summer. None of this stopped its dedicated core of roughnecks, book lovers, characters, and social outcasts from gathering there many nights each week. The Atlantic Tavern has stood abandoned since it was sold to an unmotivated buyer circa 2003, which in its own way is a small mercy. For those of us who truly loved the place, it would have hurt way too much to see the dive known simply as “the Tavern” transformed into a haven for yuppies.”
Steven Donner has lived in the Greater Rochester Area for the past 13 years. He enjoys the complex demographic mix and urban/rural duality the area. As a great believer in self-reliance, Donner’s acrostic poem uses a journey narrative to show Rochester’s entrepreneurial spirit even through devastating economic circumstances by converting its unique Lilac Festival into a crossroads for trade.
Lyndsay Ely first came to Rochester as a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology. She enjoys spending long hours wandering Rochester’s Public Market shopping for treats and at the Avon Flea Market searching for treasures.
L. S. Gathmann wrote her first fantasy story at the age of seven and has never looked back. Her recent tales include Greek sirens, drug addicts, and possessed cats, not necessarily on the same page. "Want Not" represents a foray into the slightly more predictable realm of the near future, which she hopes the reader will find both entertaining and thought provoking. If forced to choose a favorite place in Rochester, L. S. Gathman would say it’s probably Highland Park, with it’s beautiful old trees and flowers.
Kim Gillett is a winner of the international Writers of the Future contest. "Mercury is Falling" is her second published story; her first appears September 2008 in the Writers of the Future: Volume XXIV anthology.
Although Kim has been a fan and reader of science fiction and fantasy since a roommate introduced her to Ursula K. Le Guin in 1977, only recently did she begin writing. She credits workshops at Rochester’s Writers & Books with Nancy Kress and Nick DiChario, and the six-week Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop with Jeanne Cavellos for helping her to learn her new craft.
Her favorite places in Rochester to find food are bakeries, such as, the venerable Cheesy Eddie’s on South Avenue and the new Goodness Cakes on University, just a stones throw from Writers & Books. She also loves wandering through Washington Grove at Cobbs Hill Park and any public library in Monroe County.
Rory Gillett is a senior at Brighton High School. He likes to write and play music, and make art.
Alicia Doty Henn is a native Rochesterian, a parent, a searcher and a researcher. Overstretched at times between Earth and Mars, she still enjoys the change in scenery.
One of her favorite places in Rochester is an internal courtyard deep in the oldest part of the University of Rochester Medical Center. “Just the sight of it is an invitation to breathe deeply. I love the rich grass, bright flowers, brick walkways, and diligent workers snoozing in the sun. They’re so cute when they’re sleeping!”
Jamie Gilman Kress attended Clarion in 2001 and has been slowly writing new stuff since. She is also a frequent attendee at writing workshops atWriters and Books, one of her favorite places in Rochester.
Nancy Kress is the author of 26 books. Her fiction has won four Nebulas, a Hugo, a John W. Campbell Memorial award, and a Sturgeon. She has lived in Rochester most of her life. Her favorite place is Restaurant Row along Park Avenue.
You can discover more about Nancy (and the world’s most spoiled toy poodle) by visiting http://www.sff.net/people/nankress/. Nancy blogs at http://nancykress.blogspot.com/.
Alan Vincent Michaels was born small and naked in Washington, DC, and grew up in a less than stable home in the Maryland suburbs. Out of that instability grew an intense passion for things a few degrees off center, including science fiction, fantasy, Native American, anthropological and computer-related studies, prog-rock, and Central/South American ancient history. He has published speculative fiction, fantasy, and science fiction poems and short stories in regional or school/college-related publications over the years, and is now re-emerging after years of creative and technical writing for faceless corporations and running his own music publication company and advertising/corporate communications firm. Now he finds himself once again delving into things a few degrees off center.
Alan moved to Rochester in 1980 and now lives in Greece with his wife, Michele. You can learn more about him at http://www.alanmichaels.com.
Gary A. Mitchell is a program manager at Kodak. He’s been writing for pleasure ever since he learned how to get his hands around one of those log-sized pencils they give you in first grade. One of the enjoyable aspects about writing this story, he says, was the walk he took through Mt. Hope Cemetery to gather authentic setting details. He originally intended them for a different story, but when he sat down at the keyboard, this one fell out of his fingers.
Gary’s favorite place in Rochester? “Anywhere land meets water—the Canal, the Genesee River and its many waterfalls, and the beaches that stitch Lake Ontario to the shore.”
Tom Moran, a former aerospace engineer, has taught at RIT for 13 years. He is working on a book about literary engineers: engineers who write short stories, novels and poems. His essays and non-fiction articles have appeared in numerous publications, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and the Seattle Times.
Tom has two favorite places in Rochester: The George Eastman House, where he always knows the images on the walls will make his visit a visual adventure, and Paola’s Burrito Place on South Ave, where the tortas remind him of the great Mexican food he enjoyed during his years living in Los Angeles.
Dana Paxson writes fiction and nonfiction of all kinds, occasionally getting some of each published in paper form and electronic form. Mathematics, inventions, publishing software, literature, cognitive science, cosmology, and art fascinate him. This story was told to him by a ghost in 2057. It was never published in print. The original version was written in the mid-1990s, and the only change needed for this anthology was to change the year from 2032 to 2034. “Let’s just hope the New York State Legislature can get the state out of the debt hole it’s in.”
Dana’s favorite place in Rochester? ”I’ve got a bunch of them.The one that keeps coming back to mind the most is Turning Point Park on the lower Genesee, where long walkways pass through deep grass and river reaches, and the city’s embrace seems loose and kind. Then there’s Genesee Valley Park where the canal crosses the river, and rotting concrete bridges arch over the canal’s slow water among the trees; and if you cross the river to the west there and turn south, you pick up the Genesee Valley Canal trail that takes you ninety miles up the Genesee through the Letchworth gorge and on to Cuba, not far from the Pennsylvania border, money turned to hope turned to history in green and stone.”
You can find out more about Dana’s fascinations at http://www.danawpaxson.com/.
Eric Scoles lives in Irondequoit in a reality augmented by his wife, stepchildren, and two cats. In the spring, he likes to hang out in the Sunken Garden in Highland Park, and he enjoys Mt. Hope Cemetery in the fall.
You can learn more about him at http://feralrobots.net/, among other places.
