JENNIFER MARIE BRISSETT has a story at The Future Fire. LIZ ARGALL has a story in the new anthology This Is How You Die.ĬHAZ BRENCHLEY‘s book Rotten Rowis out this week. Seriously, people, look at these names and titles! Click on the live links to the author websites and publications!

(You can read a more detailed and personal account of this group from another participant HERE.) But we want to share a sampling of publications by these folks because this suggests the caliber and variety among which we felt lucky to spend a week. There were fourteen of us, so we won’t go into too much detail here. But as far as we’re concerned, the 2013 group was a great bunch of nerds. With great folks like Brotherton, Ready, and Schwortz sharing their awe of the universe, it may not matter who the participants are. Andria is on leave from her tenured community college faculty position to earn a PhD at the University of Wyoming in Astronomy with a focus in science education.

That’s right, he scheduled experiment time on the Hubble Space Telescope. Ready started working at an observatory when he was thirteen years old and, more recently, has held positions at the Space Telescope Science Institute and NASA’s Goddard Spaceflight Center. This year’s main guest instructors were Christian Ready and Andria Schwortz.

He coordinates the whole workshop (from making sure we had towels to arranging for telescope time), teaches a lot of the workshop content, and throws a great wrap party with snacks, beverages, and a far-out basement. Brotherton likes quasars and makes sure the workshop participants get more than they bargain for. And that’s what Mike Brotherton, an astronomy professor at the University of Wyoming who’s published two novels, did. How do you organize a space party like Launch Pad? You planet. In other words, how do writers learn about the really big universe? By cosmosis! Launch Pad 2013 We spent a week in Laramie,Wyoming, in this intensive seminar, and we’ve written a little of what we learned HERE and HERE. If you’re a writer interested in science, especially if you’re a science-fiction writer or a science journalist (or even a poet like Anna who’s interested in science terminology and metaphors), you should consider applying to the Launch Pad Astronomy Workshop. Recently, we completed our second science-writer workshop of the summer, and it was purposefully more intense on the science side. For all the Launch Pad posts, click HERE. NOTE: If you didn’t see our article at The Huffington Post last week, please read “The Nobel Prize: Where Are the Women?” It’s a piece we generated as participants in the Santa Fe Science Writing Workshop earlier this summer.

Launch Pad by Jody Lynn Nye