John Scalzi is the Campbell-winning author of the Old Man's War series and The Android's Dream. His blog, The Whatever, got 12 million unique visits in 2008.

Cherie Priest, horror author of Four and Twenty Blackbirds, internet-savvy blogger.

Steve Eley is what you could call a Renaissance man of podcasting. He writes, edits, and produces podcasts on science fiction, horror, and fantasy as Escape Pod, Pseudopod, and PodCastle, respectively. Eley’s written a few pieces of this fiction himself, as well as one of the precursors to the Flying Spaghetti Monster, the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Dawn Kuczwara's acting career began at birth, when she realized that PRETENDING various emotional states got her pretty much anything she wanted. These acquired talents served her well when, in second grade, she managed to win the lead part in the Christmas pageant, beating out the other cute blonde girl in the class for the part. It was all downhill from there. As a theater student in college, Dawn auditioned for, and won, the John Belushi Memorial scholarship from The Second City, and immediately after that changed her major from theater to computer science. But she has remained involved in acting, performing off and on with the fannish improv troupe, Space Time Theater.

Greg Williams has worked as (among other things) a camp counselor, cop, armored truck driver, bill collector, helpdesk engineer, and technical manager, which all require dealing with hostile audiences and having a good sense of humor. Greg's undergrad degree was in Law Enforcement, with a minor in Theatre qualifying him to either be a cop, or on Miami Vice. (Hey, it was the 80's ok?) His unfortunate unappreciated career in community theatre forced led him into improv comedy, which he has been inflicting on providing for fannish audiences in various forms for over ten years.

Megan Rose Gedris was kidnapped by lesbian pirates from outer space, and then decided to write a comic book about it. (Not really, but she is the creator of "I Was Kidnapped By Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space!!!") She also draws another one called YU+ME, and has started her own small press company, Rosalarian Publishing. Penguicon 4.0 was the first convention she ever went to! Before 2006, she had no idea that some dice had more or less than six sides, and she had never been accused of being a werewolf.

Jason Dunstan created Ardra in 2005. Despite several missteps along the way, the comic continues to gain in popularity (due in no small part to the work of his talented artist, Trevor Adams, and webmaster/story editor Fesworks). He created his webcomic out of frustration with the fact that stupid people breed far too often (a fact that one learns quickly when working in retail). A question entered his mind: What if a super-intellectual female scientist decided to have children, and raise them as an ongoing behavioral experiment? And thus, a webcomic was born. Dunstan strives to make Ardra a source of intelligent humor that's at least semi-appropriate for all audiences ("Hot nerdy women" fan-service vote incentives notwithstanding). Dunstan, 34, lives in Indianapolis, IN, with his roommate and two cats. He enjoys reading, cooking, and writing...in particular, writing for his webcomic. He is a huge fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and desperately wants the "Haunting Torgo Theme" as his ringtone. He also wishes he had lots of money and a beautiful and highly intelligent girlfriend, but the Torgo ringtone will probably be far easier to achieve.

Mark Savary is the creator behind the Autumn Lake webcomic and co-host of The Webcomic Beacon. According to Mark: "I was about four years old. I had inherited or been given a student desk (you know, the old kind with the hole in it for an inkwell). I was sitting there, and out of the blue, I said to myself, "I'm going to draw something." Seriously, just like that. It was as if I had made some momentous decision, full of all the conviction and determination of a soldier, or a prizefighter, or a king (or, as much of any of that as a four year old can manage). Why? I have no idea. All I know is that somewhere in my head, a switch had been thrown, and I wanted to draw. " It was with that revelation that a life-long passion was born!

Tom Smith is a filker whose musical styles are as varied as the topics of his songs. He's played folk, operatic, hip-hop, and Klezmer, just to name a few, and sung about topics such as pop-culture, politics, and even Penguicon. He's known for instafilking (quickly writing or improvising songs) and his grueling projects—such as iTom where he produced a new song each week and his twenty-four hour song project where he wrote seventeen songs in twenty-four hours. He's been nominated for thirty-four Pegasus Awards and won fourteen of those times. He was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 2005.

At Dragon*Con 2004, Dr. Demento declared "the great Luke Ski" to be his radio program's "Most Requested Artist of the 21st Century". Since then, Luke has held onto that title by having a song within the top five of "The Dr. Demento Show's" year-end "Funny 25" countdown of his most requested songs of the year for five years in a row, including two of them at #1. His song parodies, originals, stand-up and sketches about pop culture phenomena have made him a favorite performer at science-fiction and fandom conventions all across the Midwest and beyond. He's released six albums over the past ten plus years, and a DVD in 2006, titled "The Ego Has Landed", featuring appearances by many fellow artists of "the FuMP", nearly all of whom are appearing at Penguicon.

Andrew Plotkin is a multiple XYZZY award-winning author of Interactive Fiction (aka "text adventures"). He pushes the boundaries of how to actively explore a dramatic narrative in works such as "Shade", "Hunter, In Darkness", "Spider and Web", and "So Far". He programmed the Glulx virtual machine for Interactive Fiction, and helps maintain the Interactive Fiction Archive. If you're new to Interactive Fiction and want to play it in your web browser, try his tutorial game "Dreamhold".

Shawn Powers is one of the editors for Linux Journal, and also a tech director for a school in northern Michigan. While he has done everything from instructional videos, to writing, to podcasting, to system administration -- sadly he's best known for his strange hairdo. His love of Linux and Science Fiction have convinced him Penguicon was designed specifically for him. We're too kind to burst his bubble. If you see Shawn, be sure to ask him to, "do his best Jagger." Trust us.

Kyle Rankin is a senior system administrator for Quinstreet, Inc., the current president of the North Bay Linux Users' Group, the author of Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks, and Ubuntu Hacks and has contributed to a number of other O'Reilly books. Kyle is also a columnist for Linux Journal and has had articles featured in PC Magazine, TechTarget, and other publications.

Jorge Castro, former head of the Tech Track for Penguicon and an extremely popular tech presenter here, is External Projects Developer Liaison for Canonical, the company that leads development of Ubuntu Linux. He loves to write about GNOME, and has been a contributor to the GNOME Journal and Linux.Ars.

Jim Hall is best known as founder of the FreeDOS Project. Since 1994, Jim has been the project's coordinator and webmaster, helping build the FreeDOS developer community and the release of "FreeDOS 1.0" in 2006. FreeDOS now ships as an operating system option with several computer companies, including HP and Dell. More generally, Jim is a developer and an advocate of free / open source software, and has helped several companies release DOS applications under an open source license. As a developer, Jim wrote the GNU Robots game and made other contributions (large and small) to several free / open source software projects including: GTKpod, Atomic Tanks, and the Freemacs editor (a clone of GNU Emacs for DOS systems.)

Bill Childers hails from sunny Silicon Valley, where he lives with his better half and brood of two. Bill coauthored Ubuntu Hacks with the infamous Kyle Rankin, and has contributed to other O'Reilly books. He is also a regular columnist for Linux Journal, delving into a variety of subjects including his adventures as Bill Deere in Second Life. He is the mastermind behind Billix: 256MB of system administration power that runs on your finger! In his free time, Bill enjoys watching Mythbusters and not trying what he sees at home, even though he is a trained professional.

Jim C. Hines began writing in the early 90s, while working on a degree in psychology from Michigan State University. His first professional sale was the award-winning "Blade of the Bunny," which took first place in the 1998 Writers of the Future competition and was published in Writers of the Future XV. His work has appeared in Realms of Fantasy, Turn the Other Chick, Sword and Sorceress XXI, and over thirty other magazines and anthologies. During this time, he also picked up a Masters degree in English from Eastern Michigan University. His latest book The Stepsister Scheme came out in January.

Catherine Devlin is chair of PyOhio and a frequent speaker on Python. She trained as a chemical engineer at MIT, was kidnapped and enslaved aboard a C-programming galley, and was marooned for many years on the barren Isle of the Unending Doctoral Program. While bathing in the pleasant but ill-paid waters of the Secretarial Pool, she was mysteriously transformed into an Oracle Database Administrator. She discovered Python in 2003, and her creativity at finding excuses to incorporate Python into DBA work is legendary. She lives near Dayton, OH and blogs here.

Will Niebling is a game designer who began working part-time for TSR in the mid-1970s and helped work on the original Dungeon Masters Guide. In 1979, he became executive vice president of TSR Sales and Marketing, as well as their convention director. He has worked as a game trade consultant for companies such as Random House, Berkley Publishing, DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Capital City Distribution and helped direct programs for game companies such as Grenadier Miniatures, Wizards of the Coast, Koplow, and Mayfair Games. Mr. Niebling has served on the board of directors of the Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA) for many years. In 1997, he was part of group that took over the company Mayfair Games. In 2007, he left as the CEO of Mayfair to form a new game company called Elfinwerks, allowing him to concentrate on game design and development. He also works closely with Koplow Games in a variety of projects.

William Niebling worked at Mayfair Games for seven years, first as a proofreader and editor, working up to become the Editorial Director. In that role, William oversaw every aspect of game development and production, from the initial submission to finished product. Since leaving Mayfair, William has been working as a freelance editor and writer for a variety of American and foreign game publishers.

Alex Yeager. A founding member of the Steve Jackson Games and Cheapass Games demo teams, Alex started working with the Mayfair Games crew in the late 1990s, and became a full-time member of the Mayfair team in 2005. Alex will be on hand all weekend to demo the traveling game library of all games submitted for this year's Origins Awards.

Eric S. Raymond is the author of Jargon File, The Cathedral And The Bazaar and a frequent and colorful open source spokesperson. Raymond co-founded the Open Source Initiative in 1998, and coined the aphorism "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow." He credits Linus Torvalds with the inspiration for this quotation, which he dubs "Linus' Law".

Frank Hayes is a tech columnist for Computerworld, a long-time associate of the Dorsai Irregulars, and a prominent Filk musician. A four-time Pegasus winner, nine-time Pegasus nominee, and inductee into the Filk Hall of Fame, his songs "Never Set The Cat On Fire", "Cosmos", (which was played for the astronauts during a shuttle mission) and "The Grandfather Clock" have become standards of the genre. Frank is also the editor of Computerworld's Shark Tank ("true tales of IT life"), and his first version of Linux was 0.9, sometime around 1993.

Brian Briggs started posting stories he had written on some free Web space in January 2000. Quickly overrunning his bandwidth quota, he convinced his wife he needed his own domain and BBspot.com was born. In January 2003, Brian “quit his day job” and started doing BBspot full time. In the fall of 2008, Citadel Press published his first book, The BBook of Geek: The Only Geek Humor Book You’ll Ever Need. He lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with his lovely wife, two wonderful children, and a life-sized, talking Darth Vader.