Kelly Link

Keynote Speaker

Hailed as "the most darkly playful voice in American fiction," indie publisher, short story writer, and MacArthur grant recipient Kelly Link creates brilliantly detailed, emotionally haunting "pocket universes" laced with humor and magic. Link enchants audiences with her fantastical imagination and infectious zest for both writing and publishing. 

Kelly Link is the author of the collections Get in Trouble, Stranger Things Happen, Magic for Beginners, Pretty Monsters, and White Cat, Black Dog.  She and Gavin J. Grant have co-edited a number of anthologies, including multiple volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and, for young adults, Monstrous Affections and Steampunk! 

She has received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts and was a finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her short story collection Get in Trouble. Link is also a recipient of the 2018 MacArthur ‘Genius’ Grant for “pushing the boundaries of literary fiction in works that combine the surreal and fantastical with the concerns and emotional realism of contemporary life.”

Learn more about Kelly Link here.

Jason Aukerman

Dr. Aukerman is the Director of the Ray Bradbury Center at Indiana University Indianapolis. He oversees the curation and preservation of one of the largest single-author archives in the United States, including more than 150,000 pages of Ray Bradbury’s published and unpublished works. The Ray Bradbury Center is a national resource for literacy advocacy and public engagement. 

Rod Smolla

Rod Smolla is President of Vermont Law and Graduate School. A noted constitutional law scholar and litigator, he has presented arguments in state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court. His article, The Life of the Mind and a Life of Meaning: Reflections on Fahrenheit 451, was published in The Michigan Law Review in 2009. 

Smolla will lead the audience in an inter-active role- playing exercise exploring the anatomy of censorship.   Audience members will play the roles of Justices of the United States Supreme Court, in a “moot court” argument involving a fictional case pending before the Court.  The case involves allegations of censorship brought by a professor who teaches a course on issues relative to diversity, equity and inclusion, which includes, among the assigned books for students to read, Fahrenheit 451.  Smolla will first play the role of lawyer arguing on behalf of one side of the dispute, and then play the role of lawyer for the opposing side.  Audience members, playing the role of the Justices, will be invited to pepper each of the two lawyers with questions, and then debate the proper outcome of the case.