Guest Speakers

We are delighted to announce our guest speakers for Accio 2005: Elizabeth Kay, Steve Vander Ark and Edmund Kern.

Steve Vander Ark

Steve is the creator and editor of the Harry Potter Lexicon website, a comprehensive reference tool on the Potterverse extensively used by fans and even J K Rowling herself as she proved when she bestowed upon Steve's site one of her website's fandom awards. Steve is from Grand Rapids, Michigan (U.S.A.), where he works as a School Librarian. He is also director of his local community theatre as well as a freelance writer and columnist.

Elizabeth Kay

Elizabeth Kay is a poet, writer and teacher of Art and Creative Writing. She lives in Surrey. The Divide, her debut novel for children, was published to enthusiastic reviews and has sold over 150,000 copies worldwide, in countries as far afield as Japan, Finland, the USA and Canada. The sequel, Back to the Divide, was published in August '04 and is showing every sign of being even more successful than the first book. Elizabeth's publisher is Barry Cunningham of The Chicken House - well known as the man who set up Bloomsbury's children's list and signed the original Harry Potter contract with J K Rowling. Elizabeth Kay was one of the first new writers he signed for The Chicken House.

You can find out more about Elizabeth Kay here: http://www.accio.org.uk/elizabeth.shtml.

Edmund Kern

The Phoenix in Harry Potter: the Metaphoric Power of the Past

Edmund M. Kern is the author of The Wisdom of Harry Potter: What Our Favorite Hero Teaches Us About Moral Choices (Prometheus Books, September 2003) and "Harry Potter, Stoic Boy Wonder" (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 November 2001), which has been reprinted in Readings on J. K. Rowling, edited by Gary Wiener. Professor Kern received his Ph.D. in Early Modern European History from the University of Minnesota, and he is currently Chair of the Department of History at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin, where he has taught since 1992. His essays and reviews on the history of witchcraft and religious culture have appeared in several periodicals and anthologies, including The Sixteenth Century Journal, The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, The Austrian History Yearbook, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, The Witchcraft Reader, edited by Darren Oldridge, and Infinite Boundaries, edited by Max Reinhart. He has served as a media consultant on witchcraft and witch-hunting, historical and modern paganism, and the roots of Halloween. In addition to continuing work on other projects, he is completing Witchcraft and the Confessional State, a book on religion and politics in European witchcraft-trials.