John Crowley, Guest of Honor at Readercon 3, was born in the appropriately liminal town of Presque Isle, Maine, in 1942, his father then an officer in the US Army Air Corps. He grew up in Vermont, northeastern Kentucky, and (for the longest stretch) Indiana, where he went to high school and college. He published his first novel (The Deep,Doubleday) in 1975, and his 15th volume of fiction (Four Freedoms) this year. Since 1993 he has taught creative writing at Yale University. In 1992 he received the Award in Literature from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. He has thrice won the World Fantasy Award: for Best Novella (Great Work of Time; Bantam, 1989), novel (Little, Big; Bantam, 1981) and in 2006 the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award. He finds it more gratifying that most of his work is still in print: the Ægypt Cycle, which began to appear in 1987 with Ægypt, and concluded with Endless Things (available in its original hardcover from Small Beer Press), appears in a uniform edition from Overlook Press, starting with The Solitudes, the true title of the first volume, and continuing with the remaining three. Lifetime Achievement or no, his latest novel (Four Freedoms, William Morrow 2008) is about workers building a bomber during World War II and is without nameable fantasy content.

In addition to fiction, Crowley has issued a volume of nonfiction mostly about books (In Other Words), and for many years he worked as a writer of films, mainly historical documentaries. These include The World of Tomorrow, about the 1939 World's Fair, and FIT: Episodes in the History of the Body (produced and directed by his wife Laurie Block). He lives in Massachusetts.