Philcon 2026 Guests

Charlie Jane Anders

Principal Speaker

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Lessons in Magic and Disaster (Tor Books, 2025), All the Birds in the Sky, The City in the Middle of the Night and the young-adult Unstoppable trilogy. She’s also the author of the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes, and Never Say You Can’t Survive, a book about how to use creative writing to get through hard times. She’s won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus Awards. She co-created Escapade, a transgender superhero, for Marvel Comics and wrote her into the long-running New Mutants comic. And she’s currently the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer for the Washington Post. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

You can learn more about Charlie Jane from her website: https://www.charliejaneanders.com/

Donato Giancola

Artist Guest

Donato Giancola is recognized as one of the leading narrative visual artists in the SFF genre. Over the course of his thirty-three-year career as a freelance artist, Donato’s oil paintings have graced the covers of over three hundred novels, appeared in scores of exhibitions, and landed him numerous peer honors, notably including three Hugo Awards, and twenty-three Chesley Awards, and the prestigious Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators. His formative artistic experiences include working as a studio assistant to the preeminent figure painter Vincent Desiderio, and long days of study in the museums of New York.

Beyond creating his own art, he has worked to give back to the narrative-art genre, teaching at the School of Visual Arts for twenty-five years and mentoring artists online. He also appears at various institutions, universities, workshops, and events worldwide performing demonstrations, exhibiting work, and lecturing. Donato is currently engaged on multiple fronts with his genre-themed works for exhibition, as well as book projects for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, ongoing commercial book assignments, and explorations on his developing themes of Empathetic Robots and astronauts. Donato lives and works with his wife in Brooklyn, New York.

You can see Donato’s work and learn more about him at his website: https://donatoarts.com/

Sarah Pinsker

Musical Guest

Sarah Pinsker, better known now for her fiction, spent years as a touring singer/songwriter, putting out three solo albums on various independent labels and one with her rock band, the Stalking Horses. She has played at hole-in-the-wall bars and DIY venues, and on festival stages in front of tens of thousands. It shows in her music-related fiction, such as the Nebula Award-winning novel A Song For A New Day and the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and Eugie Foster Award winning short story “Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather.” It also makes its way into her non-music stories in more subtle ways, in the rhythms of roadside motels and diners. She has gotten lost in nearly every state on the map, and learned to recognize that getting lost is often the best way to find stories. While these days she focuses more on her fiction than her music, she sees them both as colors in the storytelling palette.

You can listen to Sarah’s music and read some of his writings on her website at https://sarahpinsker.com/