Sirens received a wide variety of programming proposals in many fields for our 2010 conference. To facilitate the selection of programming proposals from the submissions pool, we depended on the decisions of an independent review board whose members evaluated presentations based on relevance, representation of the widest possible variety of topics, and quality of scholarship. The review board, in turn, represented the various areas in which we expected to receive the majority of submissions so that those with direct knowledge of subject areas evaluate proposals.

We are grateful to our board members for lending their expertise to Sirens. If you have any questions about programming or the selection process for programming proposals, please write to our programming team at (programming at sirensconference.org).

Sharon K. Goetz works for a print-and-digital project that creates critical editions. Too fond of textuality for her own good, she has also written software manuals, taught college writing courses oriented around speculative fiction and King Arthur, and completed a Ph.D. investigating medieval English chronicles amidst their manuscript contexts. Sharon served as Academic Programming Coordinator for Terminus and Phoenix Rising and as Programming Secretary for The Witching Hour; in 2002 she chaired the Medieval Performativity conference that celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the UC Berkeley Beowulf Marathon. Amongst Sharon's leisure pursuits are reading widely, playing video games, and volunteering as a Strange Horizons copy-editor.

Mallory Clare Loehr is the editor-in-chief of Random House Books for Young Readers, where she has worked for twenty years! She edits everything from six-page board books to six-hundred-page young adult titles, with a particular fondess for fantasy geared toward any age. She is Tamora Pierce's editor for the Tortall books featuring Kel, Alianne (Aly), and Beka Cooper. Other fantasy/SF authors she has edited include Isobelle Carmody, Esther Friesner, and Lauren McLaughlin. She has also worked on all the Magic Tree House books by Mary Pope Osborne—the ongoing best-selling series that has launched many a fantasy reader. Mallory is in publishing because she is a reader first and foremost, although her reading volume has been stunted by the arrival of two children. Once upon a time she read ten books a week, frequented flea markets, and danced Argentine tango late into the night. Now she lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, two small(ish) children, and one cat. In her (little) spare time, she reads as well as organizes libraries at home, at work, and at her son's school. She is addicted to parentheses and footwear.

Shweta Narayan is a writer, a poet, and a graduate student in linguistics at UC Berkeley. Her academic interests range over cognition, communication, and the arts; her most recent academic publication discusses myth and poetry, and she's working on a dissertation about the conceptual processes involved in understanding Comics. Shweta's short fiction has recently appeared in Strange Horizons, GUD, and Shimmer's Clockwork Jungle Book, and her poetry in Goblin Fruit; she has stories forthcoming in Realms of Fantasy, the Beastly Bride anthology, and the Clockwork Phoenix 3 anthology, as well as poetry forthcoming in Mythic Delirium, Not One of Us, and Jabberwocky. Shweta attended Clarion 2007, for which she received the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship.

Dr. Rhonda Nicol is Instructional Assistant Professor of English at Illinois State University. She enjoys teaching and writing about issues of gender, power, and identity in popular cultural texts and is currently obsessed with young adult fantasy fiction, as evidenced by recent academic works such as "Harry Potter and the Reluctant Reader: Teaching Harry Potter in the College Classroom" (in Terminus: Collected Papers on Harry Potter [2010]), "'Something That Looks So Fragile': Holly Black's and Melissa Marr's Feminist Faerie Tales" (Sirens 2009 presentation), and an article comparing Twilight's Bella with Buffy the Vampire Slayer's title character (in Reading Twilight: Analytical Essays [forthcoming]).

Pat Schwieterman currently teaches at the University of San Francisco, where he occasionally has the opportunity to offer a course on his academic specialty: supernatural beings in medieval literature. He has also taught composition courses at UC Berkeley and, while there, helped to organize conferences on Old and Middle English literature. He's been an obsessive fan of fantasy literature ever since reading Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea as a teenager, and his other interests include various dead languages, living without a car, and collecting far more folk and indie-rock CDs than he has room for.

Sherwood Smith writes fantasy and science fiction novels and short fiction. Her stories have been finalists for the Nebula and Mythopoeic Fantasy Awards, and her characters, including Meliara, Wren, and Inda, are fantasy favorites. Her recently published works include Crown Duel and its prequel, A Stranger to Command; the four Inda books; Sasharia en Garde: Once a Princess and Twice a Prince; Senrid; the Wren series; and stories in Lace and Blade, Firebirds, and Firebirds Soaring: An Anthology of Original Speculative Fiction. In September 2010 DAW will publish Coronets and Steel, a Ruritanian romance. In addition to coauthoring the Exordium series with Dave Trowbridge, she has published novels set in others' worlds, including Earth: Final Conflict, Andromeda, L. Frank Baum's Oz, and (with Andre Norton) the Solar Queen and Time Traders universes.

Catherine Tosenberger is Assistant Professor of English (Young People's Texts and Cultures) at the University of Winnipeg. She received her M.A. in English (specializing in folklore) from The Ohio State University in 2001, and her Ph.D. in English (specializing in children's literature and folklore) from the University of Florida in 2007. Her dissertation was on Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet, and she has published two articles on that topic; she has also written about the folklore-inspired television series Supernatural. She teaches courses on children's and YA literature, fairy tales, Disney, and popular culture.