Guests of Honor
Tim Johnson is Curator of Special Collections & Rare Books and the E. W. McDiarmid Curator of the Sherlock Holmes Collections for the University of Minnesota Libraries. In these capacities he oversees the University Libraries main rare book collection and over 150 special collections, including the world’s largest gathering of material related to that most famous consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes. As a young boy he read some of the Holmes stories and watched a Rathbone movie or two, but it was not until he was older, when Grenada and PBS gave us Jeremy Brett, that he was drawn back to Baker Street. Every Thursday night his VCR was set to record another Holmes adventure; he was hooked. Tim has an undergraduate degree in history and graduate degrees in Library Science and Theological Studies. His previous experience includes work as a reference/instructional services librarian, medical librarian, library director, and director of archives.
Peggy Perdue is Curator of the Toronto Public Library's Arthur Conan Doyle Collection. She feels fortunate to have a full time job working with Mr. Sherlock Holmes and his creator, and loves sharing the Collection's resources with researchers and fans. Prior to joining the Toronto Public Library, she honed her librarian skills at the Royal Ontario Museum, United Nations University, and the Japan Foundation. Peggy has received the Beacon Society award for teaching Sherlock Holmes, and the Baker Street Irregulars' Eddie Award for her monograph on the use of Holmes' image in advertising. She is a member of the Bootmakers of Toronto, the Baker Street Irregulars ("Violet Westbury"), the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and the Five Orange Pips. Peggy's goal of being literate in all the major Sherlockian languages will be complete whenever she gets around to Danish.
Guest Panelists
Guest panelists subject to change.
Archia (aka deuxexmycroft on AO3) is a hobbyist artist, writer and comicker from New Zealand and the UK who has been in the BBC Sherlock fandom since the show first aired, under various aliases. She prefers consuming and creating alternate universe fanworks, especially those that delve into the 'dark' sides of Sherlock fandom.
Destination Toast (aka Toasty) is curious, geeky, fannish, and statistical. She enjoys making graphs about the quirky, creative, and highly enthusiastic Sherlock Holmes fandom, and about fandom more broadly. She also writes fanfic and meta, mostly for BBC Sherlock, though she's a fan of many Sherlock Holmes adaptations. Data & Geordi were her first Holmes & Watson.
Earlgreytea68 is a professor of copyright and trademark and a published novelist. She has also written over 200,000 words about a fictional clone baby in “Nature & Nurture.” Her other Sherlock work frequently reflects the fact that she fell into an AU rabbit hole at one point (“Saving Sherlock Holmes”; “The Bang & The Clatter”). EGT has written both “traditional” Johnlock and Mystrade (the “Scotch” series). She’s also written Doctor Who and is currently dipping her toe into Inception. Basically, she writes too much. You can find her fic on AO3 and hang out with her on Tumblr.
Esterbrook read the ACD canon as a kid and liked it fine, but it took the first 10 minutes of the first episode of BBC Sherlock for her to fall precipitously in love with Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. She has yet to surface. She's best known in Sherlock fandom for writing the retirement-era fic "Stay."
Kelley Fesmire (anotherwellkeptsecret/penumbra) has a Bachelor of Arts in Graphic Design, but chooses to orient her talents toward the cyber world rather than the real one; drawing comics by moonlight, fitting wedding parties by daylight. Introduced to the magic of fanfiction at the ripe age of 17, Kelley has explored her talents with a number of fandoms over the past ten years. It's hard to track down her older work due to the fact that she never uses the same screen name twice, but she has drawn/written for Kim Possible, Kingdom Hearts, Gundam Wing AC, The Big Bang Theory, and Sherlock. Kelley is best known for her Sherlock fanart/fanfiction on her tumblr.
Emma Grant writes fan fiction for BBC's Sherlock, mostly of the sort intended for adults only. Under duress, she will admit to having written one called "A Cure for Boredom." She is also one of the producers of the Three Patch Podcast, where she can frequently be heard declaring her love for fanworks in all their creative glory. When not on Tumblr, she knits, teaches, parents, and drinks way too much coffee.
Polly Guo is a storyboard artist and comic artist living in LA. She is an avid slash fan and Holmes/Watson fan and she wrote and drew the comic Houdini & Holmes. She's done work for CN’s Adventure Time, Fox’s Animation Domination High Definition, and Rauch Bros. Animation’s StoryCorps animated shorts.
A Seattle area native, ishipanarmada has been interested and involved in various fandoms, but it wasn't until she came across BBC Sherlock and the Sherlock fandom that she felt at home. She's been writing for as long as she could hold a writing instrument in her hand, and is best known in the fandom for her AU fanfics such as 'The Measure of a Gentleman' and 'Perdition's Flames'. She has a serious writing/beta relationship with ShinySherlock, with whom she has co-written several crack fics as well as Beneath the Desert Moon, an Indiana Jones/Johnlock AU.
Kathleen Kaska writes the Classic Mystery Triviography Series. ™ The Sherlock Holmes Triviography and Quiz Book was a finalist for the 2013 EPIC award in nonfiction. Kathleen also writes the award-winning Sydney Lockhart Mysteries. Her latest, Murder at the Driskill, features a twelve-year-old female Sherlock Holmes impersonator.
When not writing or reading Holmes, Kathleen spends time traveling the country’s backroads, looking for new venues for her mysteries, and bird watching. Her passion for birds led to publication of her nonfiction book, The Man Who Saved the Whooping Crane: The Robert Porter Allen Story (University Press of Florida 2012).
Katya, otherwise known as against-stars, is mainly familiar for gleefully feeding every OTP she touches through the rule 63 machine -- most prominently (and relevantly) her art within the Femlock subfandom -- and is an unabashed consumer of all fanworks sweet and dirty, with a particular passion for historical and fantasy AUs. Having drawn as a minor hobby for most of her life, she began sharing her work seriously after stumbling heart-first into BBC Sherlock and from there falling even more deeply in love with the brilliance of the fanworks produced in response to it. Besides the miniseries, her favorite versions of the dynamic duo come from Elementary and the Guy Ritchie films, and her other fandoms include In The Flesh and Sleepy Hollow along with some tumblr staples like the Marvel and Tolkien universes.
John Longenbaugh is a Seattle-based writer and director. His plays include "Scotch and Donuts," "How to Be Cool," the short plays collected as "Arcana" (published this year by Dramatic Publishing) and "The Sound in the Next Room," which premieres this fall at Tacoma's Dukesbay Productions. His play "Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Christmas Carol" (published by Dramatists Publishing) has broken box office records in both Seattle and Portland, and this Christmas has both its Canadian and British premieres. John's novel "The Private Library" also concerns a surprise visit from his favorite fictional detective. He is a member of The Sound of the Baskervilles, the Seattle scion chapter of the Baker Street Irregulars, and BWAHAHA!
Mars (lifeonmars/marsdaydream), a lifelong Sherlock Holmes fan, suffered from writers' block for years until BBC Sherlock came along. Now you can most often find her (slowly) writing fic and trying to sneak in ACD references. She's probably best known for "Left," an AU in which right-handed people are special snowflakes, and more recently for "Damage." She occasionally acts as a beta and loves to chat about the writing process. British in a former life, Mars is addicted to PG Tips and can no longer be trusted to spell words like favourite.
Michi (_thekiller/traumachu ) does medical things professionally and writes unprofessionally. She wrote that greaserlock fic you might have heard of, and as a result her Spotify is full of songs your parents/grandparents probably made out to. Her passions include destroying the patriarchy, looking at prawn, and providing valuable lap real estate for cats. Moonlights as a part-time mermaid.
Ashley Morford is originally from Seattle but currently lives in Vancouver, BC with her Yorkshire Terrier Sherlock. In June 2013, Ashley watched Sherlock for the first time. Shortly after, she started the fan group Sherlock Vancouver and the consulting detective became the focus of her academic studies. Last month, she graduated from Simon Fraser University with an MA in English. Her MA project used Indigenous queer theory to look at sexuality in Sherlock and is under consideration for publication. She has also given presentations on Sherlock in the USA, the UK, and Canada. Ashley writes fanfic on AO3
and fanfiction.net under the pen name rlu1, and sells fan art on RedBubble under the same pen name. She is thrilled to be at Sherlock Seattle for the first time.
Russian émigré and longtime New Yorker, Fyodor Pavlov creates art primarily through the medium of watercolor and ink. The stylistic artistry of Pavlov's illustration places a distinct emphasis on detail when addressing subjects spanning from the Edwardian Era and the Jazz Age to muses of our current day. Pavlov’s work can be found in Zelda Magazine, Tor.com, Sherlock Holmes Mystery Magazine, G.D. Falksen’s The Ouroboros Cycle, Queerotica: A Comics Anthology, and more. Fyodor has been a fan of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson since his grandma first introduced him to the Russian translations of the stories, and the Vasilyi Livanov adaptations, and hopes to age as gracefully as those two have.
rutobuka is a wannabe comic artist who has a hard time describing her own fandom work. She's a horror/suspense lover who would like to have a better day job in the videogame industry. Also, she tries to be cool about drawing adult illustrations and says it is to break a taboo, but it is widely known that she simply loves drawing butts.
shinysherlock has written fan fiction in various fandoms for many years, but her most recent obsession is the BBC Sherlock. Shiny’s stories range from short to long, bittersweet to action-packed, casefic to AUs, and johnlock to rarepairs, with her best-known works being And Not Or and the Firefly/Sherlock crossover, Shadow and Light. In “real life” she teaches English composition and literature, and will argue forever against any of the various incarnations of Watson being dismissed as a “sidekick.” In the realm of fandom, Shiny mostly just swoons over the BBC Watson and plots schemes with her brainmate, ishipanarmada.
Stitchy (aka Buneesi on tumblr) is a rabid- err... rabbit fan of Sherlock Holmes, and is well known for her cuddly creations in the Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Marvel Universes. Raised by clowns and educated as costume designer, Stitchy currently runs The Stitchy Button fulltime as a pan-fandom craft professional. When she's not sewing Holmeses of every iteration, she's writing comics, fics, and drawing AU art in the BBC 'verse.
As a fan artist in the online BBC Sherlock community, Threadear is generally in the habit of keeping her online pursuits separate from her ‘real life’ ones - namely, working as a professional artist, designer, and part-time instructor. However, that hasn’t stopped various other passions from cropping up into her fandom activities, and earlier this year she opened up her first online shop selling handmade goods - the Red Pants!! Threadear is especially interested by the interplay between fan fiction writers and fan artists, the inspiration sparked between the their respective media, and the endless opportunities of the AU.
Angela Wong (aka gingercatsneeze) is an animation student at SCAD and a part-time children's tutor. She finds children inspiring when they are not being little trouble makers. Her first ever animation created at the age of 14, was a set of emoticons. They led her to realise how animation can connect people even in the smallest way. She started making animation shorts the following year and had the honour to present her work on screenings the year after that. She loves BBC Sherlock, but is even more fascinated by the Sherlock AUs that are created by the Sherlockians themselves. She is better known in the fandom for her AU animation and art.
Amy Zen is a self trained artist from Southern California. Focusing on digital work, she has a penchant for bold colors and portraiture, and as a result of being in limbo between high school and college, she has quite a lot of time to focus on her craft. She got seriously into art partially because of the Sherlock fandom, and is still active in it today.