We have selected the following authors to honor in Sirens's second year, as we examine and celebrate powerful, mischievous, kind, and cruel faery women in fantasy literature. Each author has written work in which faeries—both women and men—rule courts, trick mortals, and thwart expectations. We encourage you to familiarize yourself with their writing; please see our reading list for more information. These guests of honor have been invited to speak during a series of keynote events scheduled throughout the conference, and these keynote events are included in all attendees' conference registrations. Our guests will also present their work during our conference's Bedtime Stories event.

Holly Black spent her early years in a decaying Victorian mansion where her mother fed her a steady diet of ghost stories and books about faeries. Her first book, Tithe: A Modern Faerie Tale, was an ALA Top Ten Book for Teens and received starred reviews in Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Her second teen novel, Valiant, set in the same world, was an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, a Locus Magazine Recommended Read, and a recipient of the Andre Norton Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Holly also set Ironside, which debuted at #5 on the New York Times Bestseller List, in the same world, and has collaborated with Tony DiTerlizzi to create the vast Spiderwick Chronicles, which include two series, companion works, and a movie. Holly's most recent work is editing Geektastic: Stories from the Nerd Herd with Cecil Castellucci; creating the graphic Good Neighbors novels with Ted Naifeh; and writing numerous short stories. Holly currently lives in a Tudor Revival house in Massachusetts with her husband, Theo, and an ever-expanding collection of books.

For more information on Holly, please visit her website or her blog.

Marie Brennan holds an undergraduate degree in archaeology and folklore from Harvard and is now pursuing a master's degree in anthropology and folklore at Indiana University, which means that people keep giving her things like degrees and fellowship money for studying stuff that's useful to her as a fantasy writer. She rather likes this arrangement. Because she's been in school without interruption since she was five, she doesn't have the list of odd jobs that a writer should, although she did work one summer pruning Christmas trees with a very large serrated knife, which she feels ought to count for something. Her fiction includes Warrior (previously published as Doppelgänger) and Witch (previously published as Witch and Warrior), as well as her Onyx Court series—Midnight Never Come, In Ashes Lie, and the forthcoming A Star Shall Fall—as well as numerous short stories. She's been writing fantasy since she was nine or ten years old and blames this fact on Diana Wynne Jones.

For more information on Marie, please visit her website or her blog.

Of Terri Windling, Jane Yolen has said, "If there is a single person at the nexus of fantasy literature, it is Terri Windling—as editor, as writer, as painter, as muse." Terri has published over forty books, winning nine World Fantasy Awards, the Mythopoeic Award, and the Bram Stoker Award, and placing on the short list for the Tiptree Award. As a writer, she has published mythic fiction for adults, young adults, and children, and her essays on myth, folklore, and mythic arts have appeared in magazines, art books, and anthologies, as well as reference volumes such as the Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. As an editor, Terri creates and edits series for a variety of publishing houses, and helms numerous anthologies for a variety of readers, often created around myth and fairy tale themes, often in collaboration with Ellen Datlow. Terri also founded The Journal of Mythic Arts with Midori Snyder, which won the 2008 World Fantasy Award. Terri's artwork has appeared in the United States and Europe, including at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Tucson Museum of Contemporary Art. Born and raised in the United States, Terri now divides her time between Devon, England and Tucson, Arizona, and is married to the English dramatist and writer Howard Gayton.

For more information on Terri, please visit her website or her blog.