Chris Wallish
SF3 Communications Committee

WisCon 42 is a year-and-a-half away — which means NOW is the time to let us know who you’d like to see as a Guest of Honor in 2018.

Nominations for WisCon GoH come from our community. We want to hear from those of you who attend WisCon regularly and those of you who can only make it now and then. We want to hear from our volunteers and our concom members. Hey, even if you’ve never been to WisCon but you’ve been kind of wanting to come, let us know who you’d love to see as a GoH at your very first WisCon.

Nominations opened during WisCon weekend earlier this year, and they’re still open right now — but they close at the end of the week: Friday, Nov. 4, at 11:59pm Central Time

What does a Guest of Honor do?

Our Guests of Honor are part of WisCon programming all weekend long. There will be panels and discussions about their work. Each GoH gives a few readings — one during our unofficial kick-off on Thursday night at Room of One’s Own and another some time during the convention weekend. On Monday during the SignOut, they’ll be available to sign things for you. And, most prominently, on Sunday night our Guests of Honor in turn honor us with a keynote speech.

Who can I nominate?

WisCon has tended to have Guests of Honor who are writers of novels and other fiction, but we’ve also honored editors as well as individuals who are significant in the fan community in some way. For the upcoming WisCon 41 (in 2017), our Guests of Honor are Amal El-Mohtar, a poet, fiction writer, and prominent critic, and Kelly Sue DeConnick, comic book writer known for “Bitch Planet” and for her run on “Captain Marvel.” We’d also be delighted to receive nominations for artists, game writers or developers, musicians, and so on. The pool is as wide as you want to make it!

The most important thing to remember is that WisCon is a feminist convention — a Guest of Honor should be someone who upholds WisCon’s Statement of Principles in some way — and our feminism is intersectional, encouraging discussions not just about gender but also around race, class, disability, and many other axes oppression.

How do I nominate?

Send an email to: gohnoms@wiscon.net. Let us know the names of those whom you wish to nominate, and include a short paragraph about why you think they’re a good fit for WisCon and would make a great Guest of Honor. If you could provide a link to their website or to a Wikipedia page, that would be helpful.

(Please send your nominations via email only. Our nomination process is confidential — we do not ever release the names of individuals who have been nominated.)

What happens next?

In the next few months, WisCon’s convention-planning committee — the concom — will review the nominations, discuss them, and, in a series of voting, winnow the pool down to just a few people to whom we’d like to extend an invitation. Out of this process emerge the two Guests of Honor that we’ll announce for WisCon 42 at the conclusion to our Sunday evening ceremonies during the upcoming convention in 2017.