Pioneer Con

Kerry Madden-Lunsford has been a regular contributor to the LA Times OpEd page. For several years, she directed the creative writing program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where she is still a professor, and she taught in Antioch University’s MFA program in Los Angeles for a decade. She is the author of the new children’s novel, Werewolf Hamlet, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection, which received a Starred Booklist Review. Werewolf Hamlet, published by Charlesbridge Moves in 2025, has gone into a second printing and is going to be a paperback and an audiobook. Her picture book Ernestine’s Milky Way was the Alabama State Book of 2019. She also wrote the Maggie Valley Trilogy, which includes Gentle’s Holler, Louisiana’s Song, and Jessie’s Mountain. Gentle’s Holler received a Starred Kirkus and PW Review and was the State Book of North Carolina in 2007. Her biography Up Close Harper Lee was one of Booklist's Ten Top Biographies for Youth in 2009. Her first novel, Offsides, was a New York Public Library Pick for the Teen Age in 1997 and was optioned for a series by Diane Keaton and Jim Henson Productions. Her plays have been produced in Los Angeles and Tennessee, and she has published fiction in Shenandoah, Amaryllis, Belle Lettres, Carve Magazine, Scholastic Storyworks, and nonfiction in the North Carolina Literary Review, Global South, LA Weekly, Nelle, American Girl, and the Washington Post, among others. Her new children’s novel, Millie G and Vulcan is currently under submission, and she is at work on a memoir, The Family Plan – Unstable Connections. Kerry is the mother of three adult children, and a grandmother, and she now lives full-time in Birmingham, Alabama with her husband, Kiffen, and beloved dachshunds, Olive and Wilbur. Visit her at kerrymadden.com.

That Reminds me of a Story, stories and musings from Alabama Storyteller Bob Byrd.  Keynote speaker of Pioneer Con 2024

Image of Bob Byrd's keynote address at Pioneer Con 2024 (photos courtesy of Julie Kennedy)

Biographies of keynote speakers from 2016 through 2021 can be found here.

• 2024 Bob Byrd, storyteller and author of That Reminds Me of a Story, which includes stories, "Bufano Boy" and "In Charge"
• 2023 Travis Turner, author of "Capital of Dreams" and "Chimney Sweeps"
• 2022 Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters
• 2021 John Mantooth, author of The Year of the Storm
• 2020 T.K. Thorne, author of House of Rose
• 2019 Jon Padgett, author of The Secret of Ventriloquism
• 2018 Phoebe North, author of Starglass
• 2017 Brian Parker, author of Crow in the Hollow
• 2016 Lou Anders, author of Throne & Bones Series