GUESTS of HONOR – NECRONOMICON PROVIDENCE 2026
Along with a great many prominent authors, artists, and academics joining us for NecronomiCon Providence 2026, these special Guests of Honor have been selected to represent a multi-faceted and vibrant weird fiction community. We are also excited to welcome back several of our former guests of honor!
Guest panelists, presenters, speakers, and reading authors will be posted on the programming pages as they develop. Armitage Symposium presenters will be posted on the Armitage Symposium page.
GUESTS of HONOR – NECRONOMICON PROVIDENCE 2026
Linda D. Addison is an award-winning author of five collections and the first African-American recipient of the HWA Bram Stoker Award®. Her work has received two SFPA Rhysling Awards and she is recipient of the HWA Lifetime Achievement Award, HWA Mentor of the Year Award, and SFPA Grand Master of Fantastic Poetry. Linda’s papers are being collected by the University of Pittsburgh Library System (ULS) for its Horror Studies Collection. She graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University with a B.S. in Mathematics. Her work has made frequent appearances over the years on recommendation lists for Year’s Best Horror, Year’s Best Science-Fiction and Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction. She has published over 500 poems, stories and articles and is a member of CITH, HWA, SFWA, SFPA and IAMTW. Her 2025 books: Everything Endless written with Jamal J. Hodge; An Illegal Feast with Consuelo G. Flores, Andrea Goyan, Elizabeth Eve King & Elizabeth Wong. Find her work in: Waterborne anthology; Sauúti Terrors: The Dark Side; You, Human, Vol. 2; Spacefunk!; FIYAH Magazine: Sinners, Saints and Haints; The Friends and Foes of Zenobia and Weird Tales Magazine #371. (image courtesy Courtney Hartley)
Dr. Chesya Burke is an Associate Professor of English and U.S. Literatures and the director of Africana Studies at Stetson University. Having written and published over a hundred stories and articles within the genres of horror, science fiction, comics, and Afrofuturism, her academic research focuses primarily on the intersections of race, gender and genre. Her short story collection, Let’s Play White, is being taught in universities around the world, and Grammy Award winning poet, Nikki Giovanni, compared her writing to that of Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison, while Samuel Delany named her the “formidable new master of the macabre.” Her monograph, Hero Me Not, examines Storm from the XMen as an amalgam of various Black stereotypes, from the Mammy and the Jezebel to the Magical Negro, resulting in a new stereotype she terms the Negro Spiritual Woman. Chesya’s episode for I hear Fear hosted by Carey Mulligan, titled, Under the Skin, was produced by Wondery and Amazon Music and debuted on Halloween 2022 and her story, An American Fable, appears in the Jordan Peele anthology Out There Screaming.
Philip Gelatt is an award-winning writer & filmmaker who has worked in videogames, comics, TV, and film. His first film as writer/director, The Bleeding House, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2011. He went on to write the 2013 sci-fi film Europa Report and adapt Laird Barron’s novella –30– into the 2017 film They Remain. The film won “Best Narrative Feature” at the venerable HPLFF in Portland. He co-wrote & directed the rotoscope fantasy epic The Spine of Night, which premiered at SXSW in 2021 and went on to play at festivals around the world. In comics, Gelatt wrote Petrograd, a re-telling of the assassination of Rasputin, with art by Tyler Crook and is currently co-writing a horror comic with Dave Yarovesky, director of Brightburn. In games, Gelatt won a WGA award in 2016 for his work on Square Enix’s Rise of the Tomb Raider. He wrote the 2023 horror game Amnesia: The Bunker for Frictional games as well as their upcoming sci-fi horror game Ontos. In television, Gelatt wrote the majority of episodes in the first three seasons of the award-winning Netflix animated series Love Death + Robots. He directed the docu-series First Word on Horror featuring interviews with authors with many big names in weird and horror.
Badger McInnes has been working in the gaming industry for over twenty years, starting as a layout artist intern at Chaosium. Since his first publishing credit, Secrets of San Francisco, Badger did graphic design for many other Chaosium publications, including Call of Cthulhu 7th edition. Through his career, he has worked for other RPG publishers such as Miskatonic River Press, Pelgrane Press, Golden Goblin Press, and others. Since 2015, he has been the art director and book designer at Stygian Fox. Badger also runs his own little company, Squamous Studios, which has published two card games to date: Feed the Shoggoth! and Arkham Relic Hunt. He apologizes for all the cult minions that have been sacrificed over the years.
Jon Padgett is a professional–though lapsed–lesser ventriloquist. His debut collection/hybrid novel, The Secret of Ventriloquism, was named the Best Fiction Book of the Year by Rue Morgue Magazine and has been translated into three languages. Padgett is the Editor-in-Chief of Grimscribe Press, which published the influential Vastarien: A Literary Journal from 2018-2024. He is also a voiceover actor, specializing in the work of Thomas Ligotti. Padgett narrated the Penguin Random House audiobooks of The Conspiracy Against the Human Race and Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe, as well as the Chiroptera Press Ligotti audiobook, Noctuary & The Spectral Link. His Cadabra Records narrations include Ligotti’s “The Bungalow House,” “The Red Tower,” “The Small People,” “Gas Station Carnivals,” “The Clown Puppet,” “Pictures of Apocalypse,” and “Mrs. Rinaldi’s Angel,” among others, as well as LP releases of his own stories: “20 Simple Steps to Ventriloquism” and “Origami Dreams.” Padgett lives in New Orleans with his wife, daughter, and their beloved nonhuman animal family, which consists of three cats and a dog, all rescues.
Gou Tanabe is a Japanese manga creator, working mainly in horror and the adaptation of literary work, best known for adapting the stories of H. P. Lovecraft into the comic book format. His adaptations have proven so popular that they have been translated into English, French, German, Spanish and Italian. In 2002, Tanabe won honorable mention of the 4th Entame prize for an adaptation of a short story by Maxim Gorky, published in the collection “The Outsiders.” In 2007, he repeated with “Kasane,” an adaptation in two volumes by the author San’yūtei Enchō (rakugo), set in a fantastic feudal Japan. In 2014, he began adapting the works of Lovecraft. His version of Lovecraft’s “The Hound and Other Stories” (2017) was nominated for the 2018 Eisner Award.
Jeff VanderMeer is the NYT bestselling author of Hummingbird Salamander; the Borne novels (Borne, The Strange Bird, and Dead Astronauts), and the Southern Reach series (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance, Absolution), the first volume of which won the Nebula Award and Shirley Jackson Award and was adapted into a movie by Paramount. Called “the weird Thoreau” by the New Yorker, VanderMeer’s novels have been translated into 40 languages. He has spoken at MIT, Columbia, Yale, Harvard, and Vanderbilt, and has given the John Hersey Memorial Address (Key West Literary Seminar) and 2025 Walter Harding Lecture at SUNY Geneseo. Nonfiction by VanderMeer has appeared in Time, The Nation, Current Affairs, LA Times, and Esquire, among others. (image courtesy Kyle Cassidy)
For more information on programming and all our attending guest panelists and speakers, please visit our Core and Extended Programming pages.