Over the past few years, hundreds of people have joined us at Sirens, a conference about women in fantasy literature. Our attendees are readers, writers, scholars, librarians, teachers, and professionals. We read for love, for joy, for inspiration, for need, for scholarship, and for work. Our lives have been changed by women in fantasy literature: queens, dragon-slayers, sorceresses, revolutionaries, women and girls who are clever, compassionate, powerful, kind, fearsome, sometimes wicked.

For 2013, our fifth year, Sirens's theme is "reunion": a mark of both the smart, welcoming community that our attendees have built and our successful first four years. As always, we are part scholarly examination, part networking weekend, part personal retreat—and a chance to discuss, debate, and celebrate fantastic women. And as in previous years, we encourage all attendees to share their thoughts and perspectives, including as part of our programming. But in 2013, we hope that our attendees will take the opportunity to revisit, reexamine, and remix our themes of years past: warriors, faeries, monsters, and tales retold, and of course, incorporate the work of a new group of guests into their analyses.

For our reunion year, we have invited four amazing guests of honor, each of whom writes of fantastic women, and who, together, represent the first four years of Sirens. Our warrior guest is Robin LaFevers, who, in addition to her middle-grade work, writes of assassin nuns serving Death in medieval France. Ellen Kushner joins us as a revered writer of faeries, from retellings such as Thomas the Rhymer to the "punk elf" Bordertown series with Terri Windling, including, most recently, Welcome to Bordertown. For monsters, Alaya Dawn Johnson has explored both the monstrous feminine in Racing the Dark and a world of monsters in Moonshine, whose heroine is a self-proclaimed "vampire suffragette." Finally, for tales retold, Guadalupe Garcia McCall is a wonderful representation of the scope of the theme, as her latest work, Summer of the Mariposas, retells The Odyssey with five Mexican-American sisters and La Llorona as a ghostly guide.

Our website's sections describe the many aspects of Sirens, so please use the navigation bar above to learn more about our conference, programming, registration, traveling to Skamania, and connecting with other attendees. If you would like to learn more about our four previous years of Sirens, please visit our archive. If you need more information or assistance, we look forward to hearing from you. We hope you join us!