LibertyCon 35 Guests of Honor
David Mattingly
Artist Guest of Honor
I was born in Fort Collins, Colorado in 1956 to Phyllis and John W. Mattingly, the last in a line of three brothers, with John C. and James coming before me.
I have produced a whole lot of book covers over the course of my career--I stopped counting at 2000. I've worked for almost everyone in the business over the years, including Bantam, DAW, Del Rey, Dell, Marvel, Omni, Playboy, Signet, and Tor. I've done the most work, and found a home at Baen Books.
Dr. Travis Taylor
STEM Guest of Honor
Dr. Travis S. Taylor heads up the cast of The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch and can be seen on The Machines that Built America on the History Channel. He has worked on various programs for the Department of Defense and NASA for the past twenty years. His expertise includes advanced propulsion concepts, very large space telescopes, space-based beamed-energy systems, future combat technologies, and next-generation space launch concepts.
Regina Kirby
Special Guest of Honor
Regina Kirby is a fan and convention runner. She has won both the 2005 Georgia Fandom Award (later renamed the Hank Reinhardt Fandom Award) and the 2013 Rebel award, both considered lifetime achievement awards for service to fandom. She is a former Chair of Chattacon and currently serves as the head of the Events division/Programming for them. She is probably best known as the Senior Director of Programming for Dragon Con.
Terry Maggert
Master of Ceremonies
Terry has written more than fifty novels in his ten year career, ranging from Science Fiction to Fantasy to Horror, as well as a brief trip into the world of Redneck Erotica.
He's been a roofer, a pub owner, a history professor, and remains forklift qualified in three states. He still holds the record for the shortest tenure ever as president of the Palm Beach County Junior Red Cross, reigning with an iron fist for nearly eleven days in the spring of 1979.
Timothy Zahn
35th Anniversary Literary Guest
Timothy Zahn was born in Chicago in 1951 and grew up in the western suburb of Lombard. In 1980 he left grad school and began writing full time.
His latest books are Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy Book 2: Greater Good; Star Wars: Thrawn Ascendancy Book 3: Lesser Evil; The Icarus Plot; and A Call to Insurrection, the fourth of the Manticore Ascendant series with David Weber and Thomas Pope. Upcoming books include The Icarus Twin and A Call to Deception with David Weber and Thomas Pope.
David Weber
35th Anniversary Special Guest
David Weber was born in Cleveland a long, long time ago, and grew up in rural South Carolina. He was a bookworm from childhood, blessed with a father who collected autographed copies of every E. E. Smith hardcover and a mother who ran her own ad agency and encouraged him to write.
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He sold his first novel to Jim Baen, his enabler at Baen Books, in 1989. Since that time, he has perpetrated 67 solo and collaborative novels (with 2 more delivered) and an unconscionable number of anthologies upon an innocent and unsuspecting public.