Tim Powers

Writer Judge – Biography

Tim Powers

Tim Powers was born in Buffalo, New York, on Leap Year Day in 1952, but has lived in southern California since 1959. He graduated from California State University at Fullerton with a BA in English in 1976; the same year saw the publication of his first two novels, The Skies Discrowned and Epitaph in Rust. Tim’s subsequent novels are The Drawing of the Dark, The Anubis Gates (winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award and the Prix Apollo), Dinner at Deviant’s Palace (winner of the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award), On Stranger Tides, The Stress of Her Regard, Last Call (winner of the World Fantasy Award), Expiration Date, Earthquake Weather, Declare (winner of the World Fantasy Award) and Three Days to Never.

His most recent book is Hide Me Among the Graves. The Manchester Guardian called Powers “the best fantasy writer to appear in decades.” Tim has taught at the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop at Michigan State University six times and currently teaches the annual Writers of the Future workshop. He has been involved with the Contest since its early years, serving as one of the instructors (along with Algis Budrys and Orson Scott Card) at the very first official WotF workshop in Sag Harbor. He was formally inducted as a judge in 1993. Powers lives with his wife, Serena, in San Bernardino, California.

“I think I’ve been a judge for most of the quarters in the past two decades. This means that several times a year I get a stack of manuscript photocopies via next-day mail, and take a day off from my own writing to read them all and evaluate them; this is no chore, since Dave Wolverton or K.D. Wentworth has already culled them from the total volume of submissions, and invariably there is at least one story that I’m grateful to have a chance to read. I send my verdicts in, and usually I hang on to a couple of the photocopies, just because I want to have the chance to read them again before the actual anthology is published. The stories at this point have no provenance beyond their titles—I don’t know the genders or ages or addresses of the writers; and not all of them turn out to live in North America, by any means. The only thing I can be fairly sure of is that I have not read anything by any of these writers before. (Over the years, I have read a lot of subsequent books from many of them, with their names right there on the spines and their photos on the dust jacket flap—though since I’m not a very up-to-date reader, I generally don’t get around to reading them until they’ve been nominated for Hugos or Nebulas or World Fantasy Awards.)” — Tim Powers

Find out more at: facebook.com/AuthorTimPowers/ and SimonandSchuster.com/authors/Tim-Powers