ConFusion 2010

On September 22nd, 1972, Matthew Stuart Busch was born to Frederick and Peggy Busch in Lebanon, Pennsylvania. The family would soon relocate to the metro Detroit area, where Matt would spend the rest of his adolescent years, soon joined by siblings Delena, Ian, and Jessica.

Steve Collins is an attitude control system engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He has been a flight team member on Mars Observer, Galileo, Deep Space One, MER, and NASA's Deep Impact mission to blow a hole in the comet Tempel 1.

Catherynne M. Valente was born on Cinco de Mayo, 1979 in Seattle, WA, but grew up in in the wheatgrass paradise of Northern California. She has three brothers and a sister. She graduated from high school at age 15, going on to UC San Diego and Edinburgh University, receiving her B.A. in Classics with an emphasis in Ancient Greek Linguistics. She then drifted away from her M.A. program and into a long residence in the concrete and camphor wilds of Japan.

Born in Manhattan on April 20, 1939, Peter Soyer Beagle, son of Simon and Rebecca Soyer Beagle, was raised in the Bronx, New York. From an early age he was a voracious reader, and his parents encouraged him in his pursuits of the literary arts. As early as sixth grade, he proclaimed that he was going to be a writer, and during his years at the Bronx High School of Science (Class of '55), he was a frequent contributor to the school literary magazine. It was in this period that his work caught the attention of the fiction editor at Seventeen Magazine. In his senior year of high school, he entered a poem and a story into the 1955 Scholastic Writing Awards Contest, without realizing that one of the top prizes was a college scholarship. His poem took first place, and he spent the next four years at the University of Pittsburgh.