Robert Lewis Dawson joined the faculty at the Department of French and Italian, the University of Texas at Austin, in 1975 and remained there to his death. At the same time, he collected some French 15,000 books and 6,000 manuscripts, most from the long 18th century. These are in the Dawson French Collection at Cushing Library.

Son of Alva Mitchell, a professor and later department head in the Department of Drawing at Texas A&M University.

Earl Oxford Hall, Class of 1934, was a native of Crawford Texas. He attended Texas A&M College from 1930 to 1934, graduating with a degree in Electrical Engineering. He was employed by Texas Power and Light until he volunteered for service in the Army Air Force. After training in California, he was stationed at Hickam Field in Hawaii, and was on station during the attack on 7 December 1941. His unit participated in the Battle of Midway. The 42nd Bombardment Squadron (Heavy) was transferred to Plaines de Gaiacs, on New Caledonia, and flew missions from there, Espiritu Santo, Efate, and Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. He and his crew were shot down on 1 February 1943, off the coast of Choiseul Island in the Solomons.

The Earl Oxford Hall collection is the result of a quest for knowledge by his family. The quest started, as many did in World War II, with the receipt of that dreaded telegram: “The Secretary of War desired me to express my deep regret…”

The stories of the time after the telegram – the days, weeks, months of anguish, refusal to accept, of hope however fragile, are lost in the mist of time. The letters to the Air Force, asking for details – details the Air Force did not have, or would not send. Letters to the families of other crew members, hoping they had learned something. Letters from squadron mates, offering a detail here, a story there, sometime conflicting. As time marched on, both hope and contacts dwindled, leaving only the faintest residual dream of someday knowing what had happened to the lost serviceman. Mothers and fathers died, never knowing what had happened. Living with fading hope and uncertainty is another, hidden, casualty of war.

Earl’s father, H. T. Hall, wrote letters to the Army Air Corps, the Secretary of War, and his congressman, always pleading for any information on the fate of his missing son. His letters most often returned no information. Sometimes a scrap of information would come in. A letter would say “They were bombing Munda Point,” or “We didn’t know where they were going.” Letters from squadron members, from air corps acquaintances, from, family members in the Air Corps, from Earl’s fiancé, Mary Tabitha Johnson, and from the families of other members of the bomber crew gradually built a story of what happened, until the Hall family believed that Earl Hall was shot down on a mission to Munda Point, and was last seen going down with only one engine left, 200 miles from the nearest land, the last plane lost on the mission. The story seemed true, and became part of the family oral history.

The Hall family, especially his father, H. T. Hall, never gave up hope. He had reason. In December 1942, the family had received another telegram reporting Earl Hall missing in action, followed within days by a letter correcting the mistake.

The families of the crew members wrote back and forth among themselves, and to anyone they knew who might know something. They hoped that a contact might have knowledge of the mission, they shared stories they had heard, and they clung to hope that the crew were prisoners of war on a Japanese-held island.

The letters gradually ceased to be exchanged. The war ended. Finally, as of January 11, 1946, the Army Air Corps notified the families that the crew had been declared lost and presumed dead. With no reasonable hope, with no new information from the Air Corps, the families withdrew into their daily lives, and searched no more.

There were many families who shared some version of this story. World War II resulted in some 80,000 servicemen who remain “missing in action” to this day.

In the Hall family, Earl’s effects were shared with family members, leaving a packet of letters and papers, and a few artifacts, packed away and rarely examined.

In the late 1990s, Veal Hall Evans, Earl’s sister, asked her younger brother, Weldon, if he could find out where Earl died, and what had happened on 1 February 1943. So the quest, after a pause of over four decades, resumed.

The first order of research was to obtain the service record of Earl Hall. The official form was completed, and mailed to the Air Force Records Center. A reply arrived in due time. “We regret to inform you that the records for Earl O. Hall were destroyed in a fire in St. Louis in 1973. A key source was no longer in existence.

Concurrently, a search for published histories of the war in the South Pacific started to yield results. A book, Grey Geese Calling, was a history of the Eleventh Bombardment Group, with a chapter on the 42nd Bombardment Squadron, Earl’s squadron. The Military History Collection of the Cushing Library at Texas A&M had a copy of the book; Grey Geese Calling had a good history of the unit, from the duty station at Hickam Field in Hawaii, through the move to the Pacific, and on to the end of the war. It included a short description of the fate of the planes on the bombing mission of 1 February 1943. The description was detailed, but, as it turned out, not very accurate.

Other books and publications revealed details about the Army Air Force in the South Pacific, about conditions on the islands, and details about the war. Histories of the Seventh and Thirteenth Air Forces provided some details.

In 2003, a new book, Fortress Against the Sun, appeared, detailing the role of the B-17 Flying Fortress in the air war against Japan. An excellent history of the air war, it also carried another version of the loss of the Hall bomber and crew. It offered specific details, but is different from the story discovered later.

Research continued, tracking down unit histories, checking sources that might be helpful, but rarely were, and recording bits of information and cryptic citations to air force documents. Searching for Air Force documents led, via the World-Wide Web, to the Air Force Historical Unit at Maxwell Air Force Base. Queries and searches of their catalog resulted in a list of possible resources.

One of the first was a Missing Air Crew Report (MARC), detailing the 1 February 1943 mission, with the target listed as Munda Point. This document was the source of most of the information provided to the families, but, as we shall see, it was incorrect in naming the target.

The World-Wide Web had come into its own by this time. Every search seemed to turn up some new information source, or some new detail not previously known. An informative source was the “World War II Air Force Chronologies” detailing missions flown in the various theaters of war. The “Pacific Wrecks Database” was discovered, detailing the locations had details of WWII artifacts and crash sites. It ultimately yielded reports on the three aircraft lost on 1 February 1943.

In the meantime, the Air Force Historical Association (AFHA) personnel located a “History of the 11th Bombardment Unit, which confirmed two details: Earl Hall had been promoted to Major in January 1943, and he had been named Commander of 42nd Bombardment Squadron.

Soon after that, the AFHA located a microfilm of the looseleaf daily mission report of the 42nd Bombardment Squadron (H), giving a detailed chronology of actions from 18 June 1942 through 1943. A photocopy of the document (AFHA IRIS No. 44028) was obtained from the AFHA, and is in the collection.

Among the other searches, efforts to find the families of other crew members had been made, but no contact had been made. In September 2006, a phone call came. “Are you the Hall that sent e-mails about the 42nd Bombardment Squadron? My great-uncle was the Co-Pilot on your brother’s plane.” Arnold Guerrero was searching for the same bit of history as I was. He had the remaining papers of his great-uncle, including his Journal, and his flight log, from Hickam Field through 27 January 1943, and a number of photographs of members of the 42nd. The flight log was particularly interesting to correlate with the mission notebook of the 42nd. Each contained information lacking in the other, allowing us to see a more complete record of the South Pacific war for this unit.

Finally, in July 2007, I sent a final query to the AFHA at Maxwell Air Force Base. I had seen a cryptic reference to “A-2 Intelligence Reports” and one footnote that seemed to indicate they might be informative. The request went in for the “A-2 Report of 1 February 1943.” In August, an envelope arrived from Maxwell. On the same day, a random web search of Buin, a Japanese base, turned up many hits. One, on the first page, was a United States Navy Action Report. “The Navy” – skip it! Well, why not it - is for February. There was a brief report of an Army Air Force mission to Shortland Harbor – noting the loss of three of the four bombers. Then to the envelope. The AFHA had located the “A-2 Report.” As I read through it, a note referred to the mission, referring to “Appendix E.” There, finally, was the document that described the mission and air battle, with details of the mission, the flight path, and the approximate areas where each of the three planes were shot down. The report was two and one-half pages in length, as reported by the one surviving bomber pilot and crew.

The quest for what happened on 1 February 1943 was ended, and the final resting place of our relatives was known as accurately as it possible.

Gustav Wehrs was born December 29, 1915, in Nendorf, Germany. He had 5 brothers and 2 sisters, and was the 5th child born to his parents. His father was a farmer, and worked on a farm which had been in the family line for generations. He went to school in Nienberg, Germany, becoming a teacher after he graduated. He then taught school in Nienburg. In April of 1937, when Wehrs was 21 years old, he joined the Germany Army, because he could not avoid the compulsory signup any longer on the grounds of his profession. He was promoted to NCO in 1939, and promoted again to sergeant in 1942.

In 1943, he participated in the Battle of the Aegean, fighting in the battles for Kos and Leros before being captured by British soldiers. He spent the rest of the war in Egypt as a prisoner of war. He returned to Germany in 1947 or 1948, via ship. Four of his brothers had died in Russia during the war. Wehrs took over running the family farm after his father died on April 6, 1948, and also married in July of that year to his wife, Annemarie. They had two children, a son and daughter, and continued to live on the farm in Nendorf until 1958, when it was sold. The Wehrs then moved to Bremen, where Gustav got a job, and then later on to Hamburg, where he worked with electronics manufacturers.

Anthony Burgess (John Anthony Burgess Wilson) was born on February 25, 1917, in Manchester, UK, and died November 25, 1993. He graduated with honors from Manchester University with a B.A. in 1940 and went on to work for the Ministry of Education (1948-1950) and for the British Colonial Service (1954-1959, Malaya and Brunei).

Burgess was a prolific author and composer. He wrote textbooks, novels, poems, essays, scripts for stage television and film, essays, symphonies, and other material. He is best known for the novel A Clockwork Orange (1962) but also is highly regarded for his other work. Critics judge him as one of the most prolific and important writers of the twentieth century.

Burgess died in London on November 22, 1993.

An important contributor to fantastic literature, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany (1878-1957), was an Irish writer, born in London. His works ranged from fantasy to drama to poetry to science fiction to autobiography. Dunsany is often cited as having been a major influence on many writers and artists, including J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Howard, Michael Moorcock, and Neil Gaiman.

His most famous works in the fantasy genre include the 1912 anthology of stories The Book of Wonder and the 1924 novel The King of Elfland's Daughter.

Keith Laumer, born June 9, 1925, is a well-known and respected writer from the “Golden Age” of science fiction. His “Retief” stories were a staple of the science fiction magazines. Laumer received a Hugo Award for best novel, and was a frequent nominee for other awards. The majority of his papers are housed at Syracuse University and the University of Mississippi.

John Keith Laumer (1925-1993) was a well-known science fiction writer who was most active from 1959-1971, until a stroke slowed down his writing career considerably. .A prolific author, he was best known for his satirical stories of Jame Retief, which Laumer introduced in the pulp magazine Fantastic Science Fiction _Stories_in January 1960. Retief is a swashbuckling, rulebreaking galactic diplomat who serves in the Corps Diplomatique Terrestrienne, and whose adventures are based loosely in Laumer's own experiences as an employee of the U.S. Foreign Service in the 1950s.

Reverend James H. Fenner was the campus pastor at Texas A&M University from 1964 through 1970. He is currently retired and living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.

George R.R. Martin was born in 1948 in Bayonne, New Jersey. From an early age he was interested in science fiction, fantasy and comic books, and as a child began writing stories. In 1970 Martin graduated from Northwestern University with a B.S. in journalism, and received an M.S. in journalism in 1971. Martin objected to the Vietnam War, and rather then beng drafted applied for and received conscientious-objector status. For his alternative service, he worked for two years (1972–1974) as a  VISTA volunteer, attached to the Cook County Legal Assistance Foundation. From 1976 -1978 he was an English and journalism instructor at Clarke College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he also served as Writer-in-Residence from 1978-1979. In 1979 he moved to Santa Fe, where he has resided ever since.

Martin has won multiple Hugos, Nebulas, and other awards for his fiction. Martin's novels include Dying of the Light(1977), Windhaven(with Lisa Tuttle, 1981), the vampire novel Fevre Dream(1982), and The Armaggedon Rag(1983). He has authored a number of acclaimed short story collections, including A Song for Lya and Other Stories(1976), Sandkings(1981), and Tuf Voyaging(1986), among others. In addition, Martin has also edited a number of anthologies.

Martin is the chief creator, a primary contributor, and the main editor for the ongoing "mosaic universe" _Wild Cards_series of novels. The series, which began in 1987 and is still running, is written by Martin and a number of collaborators who write individual stories and novels all set within the same universe. The _Wild Cards_stories are set on an Earth where an alien virus released in 1946 caused a number of humans to be infected, turning some into "aces" (those with superpowers) and others into "jokers" (those with horrible deformities or crippling physical conditions). The series tells individual stories of aces' comic book-like adventures while also describing the social and political conditions of a planet affected by the presence of superheroes and villains.

In addition, he has written and produced for television, including the critically acclaimed Beauty and the Beast(1987-1990). as well as episodes of The Twilight Zone(1985-1989). He created and wrote a pilot __for a science fiction series in 1993, Doorways, which was not picked up.

His most notable and popular works are the books in the fantasy novel cycle A Song of Ice and Fire(1996 - ongoing), which include A Game of Thrones (1996), A Clash of Kings(1999), A Storm of Swords(2000), A Feast for Crows(2005), and A Dance with Dragons(2011). Included as part of this cycle are several short stories and novellas (the "Dunk and  Egg"  stories) that take place in the centuries before the novels.

_A Song of Ice and Fire_is one of the most popular series in the history of American fantasy. Inspired in part by the real-life English Wars of the Roses, the series details the military struggles, political machinations, and personal sufferings resulting from a prolonged civil war and bloody battle for kingship that roil the fictional continent of Westeros. The series has been translated into dozens of languages and has been made into a successful, critically acclaimed television series for HBO, Game of Thrones.

Eldest daughter of William Cruse McMurrey, subject of the William Cruse McMurrey Collection

John Henry Bliler was born on September 8, 1844, near Manchester, OH. Bliler enlisted in Company H, 104th Ohio Volunteer Infantry, on August 4, 1862. During the Civil War, he served in Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia (including New Hope Church, Kennesaw Mountain, and the Atlanta campaign). He served under General William Tecumseh Sherman, and against such Southern generals as Joseph E. Johnston and John Bell Hood.

Terri Windling was born in New Jersey in 1958. She has written several novels including The Wood Wife (1996), which won the 1997 Mythopoeic Award for Adult Fantasy Literature, as well as enjoying a notable career as a fantasy artist and as an editor.

Her anthology series include Chronicles of the Borderlands, Elsewhere, Fairy Tale Anthologies, Fairy Tales Retold, Mythic Fiction, and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror (the last four series co-edited with Ellen Datlow). She has also written a number of essays, short stories, and poems.

Windling, like her colleague, has been nominated and/or won a number of professional awards, including the 1982 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology/Collection, the World Fantasy Fantasy Awards for Best Anthology in 1992, 2000, 2003, and 2007, the 2000 Stoker Award for Best Anthology, and the 2010 Nebula Solstice Award.

Melinda Marilyn Snodgrass was born in Los Angeles in 1951, and her family moved to New Mexico when she was five months old. Under her father's tutelage, she was given every possible opportunity - she learned to ride, shoot, swim and fly fish, she sat in on his business meetings and traveled with him from a young age. She inherited her father's musical ability and studied ballet, voice, and piano. She starred with the Civic Light Opera, and also performed the role of Gretel with the New Mexico Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Hansel and Gretel. Her love of music took her to Vienna, Austria where she studied voice at the Conservatorium der Stadt Wien.

However, rather than pursuing a musical career, she returned to America to finish her college degrees, majoring in History (Magna Cum Laude) and minoring in music at the University of New Mexico. After graduating, she entered the New Mexico School of Law where her foci were Constitutional law, jurisprudence, and legal history.

After graduation, she practiced law for three years working first for Sandia National Laboratories, and then with a corporate law firm, but discovered that while she loved the law she wasn't terribly fond of lawyers. At the urging of author Victor Milan, she tried writing and never looked back. In 1984 she published her first book, the Star Trek novel The Tears of the Singers. Since then, Snodgrass has published a number of novels and short stories, including the Circuit Trilogy (1986-1988) about a Federal Court judge riding circuit in the solar system, two fantasies from Avon, one co-written with Victor Milan, and then in 1984 she and friend/fellow author George R.R. Martin created the Wild Cards Series, a shared world "mosaic universe" anthology with a focus on the real impact of superheroes in our world. The series continues today, and is scheduled to debut as a Hulu television series. Snodgrass herself, in addition to writing stories for the series and being one of its co-editors, wrote the novel Double Solitaire as part of the series in 1992.

At Martin's urging, Snodgrass entered the world of Hollywood, where she served as story editor for the 2nd and 3rd seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. While in this role, she also wrote several scripts for the show, including one of its most famous and well-received episodes, 'The Measure of a Man' . She worked on a number of other shows as well, including Reasonable Doubts and The Profiler, and wrote episodes for The Antagonists, Sliders, Strange Luck, and Odyssey 5, to name only a few. She also scripted an adaptation of Star Blazers for Disney. She has written six pilots - one of which, Star Command, aired on the UPN network.

In recent years, Snodgrass has completed the Edge trilogy (2008-2015), a series of contemporary fantasies that explore the tensions between science and rationality and religion and superstition. Her three-volume White Fang Law fantasy series, about a vampiric law firm, was originally written under the pen name Phillipa Bornikova and came out between 2012-2018. She is currently working on a military space opera series, The Imperials Saga, which debuted in 2016 with The High Ground and as of 2023 consists of four additional books.

Stina Leicht (1972-) was born in St. Louis, MO and currently resides in Austin, TX. Leicht is the author of several well-regarded novels, including the two-book The Fey and The Fallen series (2011-2012), a dark fantasy set in war-torn 1970s Northern Ireland. The first book in the series, Of Blood and Honey, was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel; the second, And Blue Skies From Pain was also a Locus nominee.

Her next novel project was the two-book series The Malorum Gates (2015-2017). The two books, Cold Ironand Blackthorne comprise a high 'flintlock fantasy' set in a world at war between the magic-using Kainen of Eledore and the magic-less humans of Acrasia. Blackthorne was a 2018 Locus nominee. In 2021, Leicht released a well-received space opera, a futuristic queer feminist riff on The Seven Samurai, entitled Persephone Station. Her latest novel Loki's Ring, a thoughtful space action-adventure set in and around a ringworld, was released in March 2023.

Leicht has also written several short stories, including "Texas Died For Somebody's Sins", published in the Rick Klaw-edited 2013 anthology Rayguns Over Texas. She received a nomination for the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2012.

Victoria McManus is a resident of Philadelphia, PA. She writes both fiction and nonfiction, under the names Victoria Janssen and Elspeth Potter, and includes both novels and short stories. Her first novel was the alternate-world fantasy The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom and Their Lover (2008), which has been translated into French, German, and Russian. Her next novel, The Moonlight Mistress (2009), features the early days of World War One and werewolves; it has been translated into Italian and has an electronic-only sequel available, “Under Her Uniform.” McManus' third novel The Duke and the Pirate Queen (2010), is a sort-of sequel to The Duchess, Her Maid, The Groom and Their Lover, focusing on different characters. In 2021-2022, under the name of Victoria Janssen, she released A Place of Refuge, a new science fiction queer romance space opera consisting of three books: Finding Refuge, Accepting Refuge, and Embracing Refuge.

Her first published short story was "Water Music" (2000), which appeared in Best Lesbian Erotica 2001 from Cleis Press, and she has since written a number of other stories that have been anthologized in various erotica collections. Her nonfiction mostly appears at the blogs Heroes and Heartbreakers (romance) and The Criminal Element (mystery, suspense, and thrillers). She also reviews anonymously for Publishers Weekly.

Marie Brennan is the pen name of an author born in 1980 in Dallas, Texas, and graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in archaeology and folklore. She attended Indiana University Bloomington and completed the coursework for a Ph.D. in cultural anthropology and folklore, but left in 2008 to write full-time. Brennan draws heavily on her academic background in her writing, taking inspiration from many real-world cultures and historical periods; she explores various aspects of world history and culture and how those inform her work in her New World Patreon, as well as on her website, Swan Tower: https://www.swantower.com/. She currently lives in northern California.

Her short story "Calling Into Silence" won the Isaac Asimov Award for Undergraduate Excellence in Science Fiction and Fantasy Writing in 2003; "The Legend of Anahata" won an Honorable Mention that same year. Her first publication was "White Shadow" in the anthology Summoned to Destiny, ed. Julie Czerneda, in 2004. In 2006 Warner Books published the fantasy duology of Doppelganger and Warrior and Witch. This was followed by her "Onyx Court" series of historical fantasies - set at various points in the history of London under which resides a court of Fae whose politics intertwine with the world above: Midnight Never Come (2008), In Ashes Lie (2009), A Star Shall Fall (2010) and With Fate Conspire (2011). In 2012, Brennan joined the online Book View Cafe and published on it the Wilders urban fantasy series, consisting of 2 novels and 2 shorter works published between 2012-2021.

Brennan's next fantasy series was set in a pastiche of Regency/Victorian Britain (and parts elsewhere). The titular character of The Memoirs of Lady Trent is a redoubtable lady adventurer and naturalist searching the world for evidence of long-vanished dragons, along the way facing and overcoming ingrained social prejudice against women. Lady Trent's adventures are chronicled in five volumes: A Natural History of Dragons (2013), The Tropic of Serpents (2014), Voyage of the Basilisk (2015), In The Labyrinth of Drakes (2016), and Within The Sanctuary of Wings (2017). A sixth volume, Turning Darkness Into Light, was released in 2019 with a new protagonist following in Lady Trent's footsteps. The series received a 2018 Hugo Award nomination for Best Series.

Brennan's more recent work has gone in several different directions. From 2016-2017, Brennan produced the 'Varekai' series of fantasy novellas, which tell the story of the mysterious warrior Ree and her quest to uncover her origins. In 2020, Brennan pulled together various of her shorter works together with a new framing chapter into the novella Driftwood, taking place in a fantasy world consisting wholly of older worlds that are aging and sinking gradually into oblivion. She has written four novels - The Eternal Knot (2019), The Night Parade of 100 Demons, The Game of 100 Candles (2023), and The Market of 100 Fortunes (2024) - set in Fantasy Flight Games' card game Legend of the Five Rings universe. In 2018, Brennan collaborated with Michael R. Underwood, Cassandra Khaw, and Malka Older on the original audio production Born to the Blade, featured on Serial Box (now Realm) and based in a world rooted in magical swordplay.

Most recently, Brennan and fellow author Alyc Helms have collaborated (under the joint pen name M.A. Carrick) on the Rook and Rose fantasy trilogy; the first volume, The Mask of Mirrors, was released in early 2021. The second volume, The Liar's Knot was released later that year, and the final volume, Labyrinth's Heart, came out in August 2023, with an additional story, "The Naming of Knots", released that same month. Brennan also released a fantasy novel from Titan Books in 2023, The Waking of Angantyr.

Brennan has written numerous works of short fiction, many of which have been assembled in five different collections, available through Book View Cafe. Since her first story in 2002, she has written close to 100 short stories, including, among her most recent, "This Living Hand" (2022), which was nominated for the 2023 WSFA Small Press Award. Most recently, she has been nominated, along with Yoon Ha Lee, for the 2023 Nebula Award for Game Writing for her work on Ninefox Gambit: Machineries of Empire Role Playing Game.

Stephen Leigh (who writes as Leigh and under the names S.L. Farrell and Matthew Farrell) was born in Cincinnati, OH, on February 27, 1951. With a B.A. in Fine Arts and an M.A. in Creative Writing, Leigh taught creative writing at Northern Kentucky University from 2001 until his retirement in 2020.

Leigh's literary debut was the short story "And Speak of Soft Defiance", published in Eternity SF in 1975; this was the first of some 40 pieces of short fiction Leigh has written. Some of Leigh's short fiction include his December 1976 story "Answer in Cold Stone" (Leigh's first Analog publication), "When We Come Down" (Asimov's, 1978), "Shaping Memory" (Asimov's, 1985), "Evening Shadow" (Asimov's, 1988), "The Bright Seas of Venus (Galaxy's Edge*, 2013), and "Bones of Air, Bones of Stone" (2015).

In addition, Leigh has written numerous stories as an original member of George R.R. Martin's Wild Cards mosaic universe collective of writers. Leigh is responsible for the creation of several notable Wild Cards characters, including Gregg Hartmann/Puppetman, Bloat, Oddity, Gimli, and Steam Wilbur. To date, Leigh (sometimes writing as S.L. Farrell) has written content for eighteen of the Wild Cards books.

Leigh has also enjoyed a successful career as a science fiction and fantasy novelist. His debut novel was 1981's Slow Fall To Dawn, which was nominated for the 1982 Locus Award for Best First Novel. Slow Fall was the first of Leigh's Neweden/Hoorka trilogy, followed by Dance of the Hag (1983) and A Quiet of Stone (1984). He wrote The Secret of the Lona in 1988, the first in the Dr. Bones series (a fantasy series written by various authors, including Leigh's Wild Cards colleague William Wu). Leigh has written 6 novels in AvoNova's Ray Bradbury Presents series (1992-1995): Dinosaur World, Dinosaur Planet, Dinosaur Samurai, Dinosaur Warriors, Dinosaur Empire, and Dinosaur Conquest. His 1998-1999 Mictlan duology includes the novels Dark Water's Embrace and Speaking Stories,

Leigh has also written several popular fantasy series. most of them under the name S.L. Farrell. These include the Cloudmages series (2003-2005), which include Holder of Lightning, Mage of Clouds, and Heir of Stone; the Nessantico Cycle (2008-2010), which includes the novels A Magic of Twilight, A Magic of Nightfall, and A Magic of Dawn; the paranormal fantasy series Sunpath Cycle (2017-2018), which includes A Fading Sun and A Rising Moon. Leigh's standalone SF&F novels include The Bones of God (1981), The Crystal Memory (1987), The Abraxas Marvel Circus (1990), Thunder Rift (2001, as Matthew Farrell, republished in 2010 as The Shape of Silence), and several others. His most recent published novel is 2021's science fiction work Amid the Crown of Stars.

The La Villita Chapter National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) began organizing meetings in October of 1944, and was officially confirmed as an NSDAR Chapter in College Station, Texas on December 4, 1944.

Your Cruise Director is the pseudonym for an author who wishes to remain private. This author frequently writes under this pseudonym (as well as Em Wycedee and MYCD), and information on them can be found on fanlore at https://fanlore.org/wiki/Your_Cruise_Director.

David Drake is a well-known author, actor, director, and playwright. He is best known for authoring and performing in "The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me", a story about a man discovering more about his sexuality while simultaneously addressing the AIDS crisis in the 1980s. His work won numerous prestigious awards. He has appeared in many short films, films, and TV series. He also serves as the Artistic Director at the Provincetown Theater.

Jindrich (Henry) Juren was born in Cermna, Bohemia on March 20, 1850. The son of Antonia (Kosut) and Reverend Cenek Juren, the minister at the local Evangelical Brethren Unity Church. After receiving his primary education through the public schools in and around the Cermna area, Jindrich served twelve months of compulsory military training in the Austrian army. From there, following in his father's ministerial footsteps, Jindrich became fluent in Czech, English, German, French, and Polish while he studied theology at several universities in Bonn, Germany, Edinburgh, Scotland, and Basel, Switzerland where he completed his seminary studies.

At the age of 26, while still residing in Europe as a theological student, Jindrich Juren was recommended by Rev. Ludwig Chlumsky to serve as the pastor for the Ross Praire Czech-Moravian Brethren Church in Texas. He accepted the call, arriving in Ross Prairie in early 1876, and shortly after in April of the same year, Jindrich was ordained in the new Brethern Church. In December 1876, Rev. Juren married Frantiska (Frances) Schiller of Industry, Texas.

Rev. Juren served not only the local congregation but was left to alone serve all members of the Unity of the Brethren in Texas when Rev. Chlumsky returned to Moravia around 1880. From 1881-1888, Rev. Juren traveled by horse and buggy, or train to surrounding congregations to provide services in or near Caldwell, Granger, Hallettsville, Industry, Shiner, Smithville, Taylor, Temple, Wallis, Wesley, West, and other Central Texas Communities. Alongside his ministerial duties, he was a public school teacher for 40 years while living between Fayetteville, Wesley, and Industry. However, Rev. Juren stayed in Fayetteville, Texas for a total of 32 years and provided a solid 45 years as resident pastor for his congregation in Ross Prairie.

Rev. Juren had a total of fourteen children, twelve living into adulthood, with his wife Frantiska before her passing on February 10, 1906. In 1911, Rev. Juren married widow Anna Jubin Mikeska with whom he had 3 children, two of which died in infancy.

Rev. Jindrich Juren died at St. Joseph's Hospital in Houston, Texas of esophageal cancer on May 2, 1921. He was buried in the Czech-Moravian Brethren Evangelical Cemetery at Ross Prairie, now known as the Fayetteville Brethren Cemetery. Also buried in the cemetery are Rev. Juren's first wife Frantiska and his second wife Anna who passed on April 5, 1965. The cemetery also contains the Rev. Jindrich Juren historical marker.

Reverend Jindirch Juren, A Dedicated Circuit MInister by Carolyn Heinsohn

Fayetteville Brethren Cemetery

D. A. Juren, “Juren, Jindrich,” Handbook of Texas Online, accessed November 07, 2022, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/juren-jindrich

Nanne Shelby Waldrop (September 10, 1877 - March 18, 1970) Daughter of Dr. Joel Selman Willis (born circa 1853, in Culloden, Monroe County, Georgia), and Amanda Baldwin Davismanda (born circa 1856, in Texas).

Elgin Award-winning author Holly Lyn Walrath (called "Houston's premier horror poet" by the Houston Press) was born and raised in a Baptist household in Garland, Texas. She graduated in 2007 from the University of Texas - Austin with a B.A. in English, and received a Master of Liberal Arts in Creative Writing degree from the University of Denver in 2015. That same year saw the first publication of her works, including the story "The Last Man on Earth" in the online flash fiction journal Grievous Earth and the poem "A Red Sky" in the online Vine Leaves Literary Journal. Since then, Walrath has published a large number of short stories, pieces of flash fiction, and poems.

Walrath published her first collection of poetry, Glimmerglass Girl (Finishing Line Press), in 2018. As A.J, Odasso, the senior poetry editor at Strange Horizons noted, “Glimmerglass Girl delights and chills the senses in equal measure, deceptively minute in its scope. Walrath challenges preconceived notions of feminine identity in these delicate, uncanny poems—and spares nobody, no body, in the process.” The collection won the 2019 Elgin Award for Best Chapbook from the Science Fiction Poetry Association. She had a collection published in Italian in 2020, Numinose Lapidi (Kipple Press), which was a semi-finalist for the 2021 Tomaž Šalamun Prize. The English translation of that collection - of horror poems written in the pantoum form - was published in April 2023 by Aqueduct Press as Numinous Stones. Walrath's most recent collection was The Smallest of Bones, released in 2021 by Clash Books and a 2021 Elgin Award nominee. The collection explores "a wide range of topics such as love, romance, relationships, queer sexuality, religion, death, demons, ghosts, bones, gender, and darkness."

Walrath's science fiction-, fantasy-, and horror-related work has appeared in many different venues, including 365 Tomorrows, Luna Station Quarterly, Fireside Fiction, Daily Science Fiction, Sunday Morning Transport, Abyss & Apex, Dreams & Nightmares, StarLine, and Eye of the Telescope* (an issue of which Walrath guest-edited in 2018), among many others. Her 2020 poem "Yes, Antimatter Is Real" was nominated for the 2021 Dwarf Stars Award from the SFPA, and she has had numerous poems nominated for the SFPA's Rhysling Award.

Walrath is also an editor - in 2019 she launched Interstellar Flight Press, an indie speculative fiction publishing company focusing on underrepresented genres and authors. She has edited 9 books for IFP as of 2022, including several that have won major industry awards.

After residing in Colorado for 8 years, and Austin for nearly 19 years, Walrath moved to and currently resides in Houston, TX.

The Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers was founded in 1913 at a meeting held in Corpus Christi, with the objective of the advancement of the science and profession of engineering. By 1980, the society had reached a membership level of over 3000, organized into eleven local branches.

The society provides opportunities for the exchange of scientific information through the organization of technical groups which hold conferences for scholarly discussion and the presentation of papers and concerns itself in many ways with the affairs of the civil engineering profession in general. It has formulated a professional code of ethics, standardized formulas for compensation, and a standardized contract. It gives honorary awards for outstanding contributors to the profession, organizes and subsidizes student chapters, and cooperates with other engineering societies in promoting the interests of engineers in the formulation of public policy. The society also publishes a monthly newsletter, The Texas Civil Engineer.