Meet the Guests of Honor of LAcon V

Most conventions honor a writer and an artist and call the job done. LAcon V is bringing seven Guests of Honor to Anaheim from August 27 to 31, plus a toastmaster and three special guests, and the list reads like a deliberate argument about what the field actually consists of.

Prose fiction is there. So is network and streaming television, comics, gold-leaf illumination, samurai epics, aerospace engineering, theme park design and the amateur press. The slate spans people who won their first Hugo in 1970 and people whose most recent one arrived in the last three years.

Barbara Hambly, author

Born in San Diego in 1951, Hambly took a master’s in medieval history from UC Riverside in 1975, including a year in Bordeaux. Before the writing paid, she worked as a high school teacher, a model, a waitress, a technical editor, an all-night liquor store clerk and a Shotokan karate instructor.

Her first novel, The Time of the Dark, appeared in 1982 and opened the Darwath sequence. The Winterlands and Windrose books followed. Those Who Hunt the Night (1989) won the Locus Award for Best Horror Novel and reframed the vampire novel as a piece of Edwardian detection; its sequel Traveling with the Dead took the Lord Ruthven Award.

Since 1997 she has also written the Benjamin January mysteries, set in 1830s New Orleans and built around a classically trained free man of color who works as a surgeon and a musician. The series is her bestselling work and one of the more sustained pieces of historical research in genre-adjacent crime fiction. She has written in both the Star Trek and Star Wars universes, served as president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America from 1994 to 1996, and taught history and humanities at Los Angeles Pierce College from 2006 to 2023. Her birthday falls on August 28 - the convention’s second day.

Ronald D. Moore, media

Moore handed a spec script to a Gene Roddenberry assistant during a set tour and turned it into a career. That script became “The Bonding,” and he joined Star Trek: The Next Generation in 1989.

He wrote 27 TNG episodes and did more than anyone to build out Klingon culture as a coherent fictional civilization. He co-wrote the series finale “All Good Things…,” which won the 1995 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation, then wrote the feature screenplays for Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact and moved on to Deep Space Nine.

His reimagined Battlestar Galactica - the 2003 miniseries and the series that followed - won a Peabody Award and reset expectations for what televised science fiction could carry. He developed Outlander for Starz and created For All Mankind for Apple TV+, an alternate-history space program drama running since 2019. In 2024 he signed with Sony Pictures Television and was named showrunner on Amazon’s God of War adaptation.

Colleen Doran, artist

Doran won a Disney-sponsored art contest at five and created A Distant Soil at twelve, publishing it in fanzines from 1979. Early in the book’s life she redrew the entire thousand-page narrative from scratch - a rare act of commitment to a single work. It has since sold more than 700,000 copies through Image Comics.

She drew for DC’s The Sandman and has worked with Alan Moore and Warren Ellis, but her most visible recent run is a sequence of Neil Gaiman adaptations. Snow, Glass, Apples (2019) won the Bram Stoker, Eisner and Ringo Awards. Chivalry (2022) won the Eisner and the Locus, executed in watercolor, ink and 18-karat gold leaf after she studied medieval illuminated manuscripts to get the technique right.

She also illustrated Stan Lee’s autobiography Amazing Fantastic Incredible, a New York Times bestseller. In 2026 she was nominated to the Will Eisner Awards Hall of Fame.

Dr. Anita Sengupta, science

Sengupta holds an MS and PhD in aerospace engineering from USC’s Viterbi School. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory she led systems engineering for the supersonic parachute that decelerated the Curiosity rover into the Martian atmosphere, and directed development and testing of the drogue parachute for the Orion spacecraft flying under Artemis. She also worked on ion propulsion.

She then led the Cold Atom Laboratory, a laser-cooling quantum physics facility now operating aboard the International Space Station, producing ultracold matter in microgravity that cannot be made on the ground.

Leaving JPL, she served as Senior Vice President of Systems Engineering at Virgin Hyperloop, building magnetically levitated transport. In 2020 she founded Hydroplane Ltd. to develop hydrogen fuel cell powerplants for aircraft; the company holds contracts with the Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Army. She is a research associate professor at USC teaching graduate entry, descent and landing, and was inducted into the Women in Emerging Aviation Technologies Hall of Fame and awarded the NAA Stinson Trophy in 2022. She is also a commercial pilot, a motorcyclist, a snowboarder and a science fiction reader.

Tim Kirk, artist

Kirk studied fine arts at Cal State Long Beach and won five Hugo Awards for Best Fan Artist between 1970 and 1976, from nine nominations - a rate nobody has since matched. His master’s thesis was a suite of Tolkien paintings, which Ballantine Books published as the 1975 Tolkien Calendar and used on covers.

In 1973 he moved into commercial illustration at Hallmark Cards and Current Inc. In 1980 he joined Walt Disney Productions as an Imagineer. He co-designed Typhoon Lagoon, sketched the waterskiing alligator that became the Blizzard Beach logo, and contributed to the Tower of Terror, the Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular and Muppet*Vision 3D. He later ran his own design firm and sits on the advisory board of the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame.

Geri Sullivan, fan

Sullivan came into fandom in 1979 after meeting author Emma Bull at a Minneapolis party, and has been publishing and organizing ever since. She has edited or co-edited Idea, gfs and Small and Far Away, and worked on the final four issues of Lee Hoffman’s Science-Fiction Five-Yearly, which won the 2007 Hugo for Best Fanzine for Hoffman, Sullivan and Randy Byers. Idea has taken multiple FAAn Awards and was a Hugo finalist in 2024.

She was the first Worldcon Hospitality Division Head, at ConJosé in 2002, and the first Worldcon Artistic Director, at Chicon 7 in 2012 - two roles that did not exist until she defined them. She chaired Minicon 35 and Smofcon 25, served as president and board member of Minn-stf, and has been post-supporting chair of the Minneapolis in ’73 bid since 1984. She built the Video Archaeology Project for MidAmeriCon II, recovering and digitizing footage from the 1976 convention. She was made a Fellow of NESFA in 2008, took Corflu 50 in 2015, went to Britain as the 2019 TAFF delegate, and received Corflu’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022.

Stan Sakai, artist

Born in Kyoto in 1953 and raised in Hawaii from the age of two, Sakai studied fine arts at the University of Hawaii and then at ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena. He broke in as a letterer, most famously on Groo the Wanderer.

In 1984 he created Usagi Yojimbo, following Miyamoto Usagi, a masterless rabbit samurai in late sixteenth-century Japan. Forty-plus years on he is still the writer and artist, with Tom Luth on colors, across a body of work that has become one of the longest sustained single-creator runs in American comics and a genuine work of historical scholarship about Edo-period Japan. He has won multiple Eisner Awards and Harveys and entered the Eisner Hall of Fame in 2020. He was executive producer on Netflix’s Samurai Rabbit: The Usagi Chronicles.

Ursula Vernon / T. Kingfisher, toastmaster

Vernon studied anthropology at Macalester, came up through webcomics, and won a Hugo for the graphic novel Digger. She writes children’s books as Ursula Vernon, including the Dragonbreath series, and adult fiction as T. Kingfisher - a name chosen partly in tribute to Ursula K. Le Guin, who once joked that “U.K.” might stand for “Ulysses Kingfisher.”

The Kingfisher shelf has collected Hugo, Nebula and Mythopoeic Awards, including Hugo wins for the novel Nettle & Bone and the novella Thornhedge, and a Nebula for the short story “Jackalope Wives.” Her painting “The Biting Pear of Salamanca” became one of the internet’s more durable memes.

And three special guests

JPL flight systems engineer Tracy Drain has spent 25 years on deep space missions - Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, Kepler, Juno, Psyche - and is chief engineer for operations on Europa Clipper, launched in October 2024.

Terese Mason Pierre is a Canadian poet and editor published in Uncanny and Fantasy Magazine, an Aurora and Ignyte nominee, and winner of the 2023 Writers’ Trust Journey Prize. She is Chief Programming Officer at Augur Magazine; her debut collection Myth is out from House of Anansi.

Tracey Baptiste, born in Trinidad and Tobago, has published 26 books, including the Jumbies trilogy built on Trinidadian folklore, Minecraft: The Crash and African Icons. She teaches in the low-residency MFA at the University of San Francisco.

Put the list end to end and the shape is clear: a convention that treats illustration, engineering, television, comics and the volunteer press as equal parts of the same enterprise.

Sources

• LAcon V official site
• Dr. Anita Sengupta – LAcon V
• Geri Sullivan – LAcon V
• Tracy Drain – LAcon V
• Terese Mason Pierre – LAcon V
• Tracey Baptiste – LAcon V

• Geri Sullivan – Fancyclopedia 3

Research verified August 8, 2026. Schedules, exhibitors, speakers, prices and access details may change; confirm current information with the organizer before attending.