Trivia Night is Back!

Speculative Fiction Trivia Night is back in 2022!

Join us on Sunday, March 20 at 5pm

Think you know a lot about speculative fiction? Our quizmaster Seanan McGuire leads the multiverse’s most challenging trivia night of science fiction, fantasy, and horror. 

This event will be held online to preserve the health of our fleet; no googling the answers, or you’ll be shown to the airlock. We will meet in Zoom and use a combination of Zoom break-out rooms, forms, and streaming to coordinate teams during the event. 

This is our third trivia night and all funds support our writing community and Clarion West’s efforts to ensure inclusive and accessible workshops — both online and in-person. 

Anyone is welcome to join Speculative Fiction Trivia Night, a fun event filled with friendly competition. You can join as an individual and be placed on a team, bring your own team, or join a team led by our amazing celebrity team captains! 

How to Join

Individuals

Join as an individual for $5 per person, we’ll place you with a group of like-minded speculative fiction fans on one of our mixed teams. Make new friends! Bragging rights went to one of these teams in 2019. Mixed-teams will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Get a boost with our celebrity team captains, listed below! Join one of the teams led by our celebrity team captains for $15 and get your trivia inspiration from an expert! Captained teams will be filled on a first-come, first-served basis.

Bring Your Own Team

$45 Bring your own team, up to a maximum of 12 players. Have all your geekiest friends, bring your Clarion West classmates, or bring your family for a chance to combine your super powers.

By participating in any Clarion West activity, you agree to our Code of Conduct, the Clarion West Harassment Policy, and our Zoom Guidelines. Please review these documents prior to attending. Tl;dr: don’t be a jerk, and everyone will have a good time!

Quizmaster

Seanan McGuire

Quizmaster Seanan McGuire is the author of the October Daye urban fantasies, the InCryptid urban fantasies, and several other works both stand-alone and in trilogies or duologies. She also writes under the pseudonym Mira Grant. A multiple award nominee for her books, Seanan has won the 2010 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, her novel Feed (as Mira Grant) was named as one of Publishers Weekly‘s Best Books, and her novels received the Goodreads Choice Awards in 2010. She won the Hugo Award in 2012 and 2013 for the Best Fancast. She won both the Hugo and Nebula Award in 2017 for Every Heart a Doorway.

Team Captains

Curtis C. Chen (CW ’14)

Once a Silicon Valley software engineer, Curtis C. Chen (陳致宇) now writes stories and runs puzzle games near Portland, Oregon. He’s the author of the Kangaroo series of funny science fiction spy thrillers and has written for the Realm originals Ninth Step Murders, Machina, and Echo Park 2060 (forthcoming). Curtis’ short fiction has appeared in Playboy Magazine, Daily Science Fiction, Oregon Reads Aloud, and elsewhere. His homebrew cat feeding robot was displayed in the “Worlds Beyond Here” exhibit at Seattle’s Wing Luke Museum. https://CurtisCChen.com

Co-Captains Tananarive Due & Steven Barnes

Steven Barnes is the NY Times bestselling author of over thirty novels of science fiction, horror, and suspense. The Image, Endeavor and Cable-Ace Award winning author also writes for television, including THE TWILIGHT ZONE, STARGATE SG-1, ANDROMEDA and an Emmy Award winning episode of THE OUTER LIMITS. He also has taught at UCLA, Seattle University, and lectured at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington D.C. With his wife, British Fantasy Award winning author Tananarive Due, he has created online courses in Afrofuturism, Black Horror, and Screenwriting. www.afrofuturismwebinar.com www.sunkenplaceclass.com

TANANARIVE DUE (tah-nah-nah-REEVE doo) is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder’s groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote “A Small Town” for Season 2 of “The Twilight Zone” on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. She is married to author Steven Barnes, with whom she collaborates on screenplays.

Steven and Tanarive live with their son, Jason, and two cats.

Co-Captains Greg and Astrid Bear

Greg Bear is the author of over forty books, the most recent being The Unfinished Land.

Astrid Bear went to her first science fiction convention at six weeks of age and never quite got over it. Many Clarion West students have enjoyed her chicken mole. She rides her bike and creates fiber art in Lynnwood WA.

Andy Duncan (CW ’94)

Boisterous, humorous, fantastical, and fabulist, Andy Duncan’s fiction has been honored with a Nebula Award, a Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award and three World Fantasy Awards, the most recent for Wakulla Springs, a 2013 Tor.com novella co-written with Ellen Klages. His third collection, An Agent of Utopia: New and Selected Stories, was published in 2018 by Small Beer Press. A South Carolina native and Clarion West graduate, he teaches writing in the Maryland mountains at Frostburg State University, which promoted him to full professor in 2019.

Cat Rambo (CW ’05)

Cat Rambo has been teaching classes and workshops for over three decades at levels ranging from 5th/6th graders through college, graduate level, and continuing at institutions including the Johns Hopkins University, Indiana University, Bellevue College, Clarion West, the PNWA conference, and more. She has an MA in writing from the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars and Clarion West in 2005. She is a Nebula Award winner and has also been nominated for the Compton Crook Award for First Novel, as well as Endeavour and World Fantasy Awards. She is the former editor of Fantasy Magazine. Her own work includes over 200 short stories, several novels, a cookbook, a guidebook to Baltimore, and Creating an Online Presence for Writers. She is a two-term former President of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). Her upcoming works include Exiles of Tabat from Wordfire Press (2020) and You Sexy Thing (Tor MacMillan, 2021).

Brooks Peck (CW ’09)

Brooks Peck worked for over 17 years as a curator at the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle where he curated exhibitions about science fiction and fantasy film, television, and literature. He has recently struck out on his own as a freelance curator, writer and researcher. Current obsessions include late-1700s astronomy, typography, and—as always—Star Trek.

A. T. Greenblatt (CW ’17)

A.T. Greenblatt is a Nebula Award winning writer and mechanical engineer. She lives in Philadelphia where she’s known to frequently subject her friends to various cooking and home brewing experiments. Her work has been nominated for a Hugo, Locus, and Sturgeon Award, has been in multiple Year’s Best anthologies, and has appeared in Tor.com, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Lightspeed, and Clarkesworld, as well as other fine publications. You can find her online at http://atgreenblatt.com and on Twitter at @AtGreenblatt

Julia Rios

Julia Rios (they/them) is a queer, Latinx writer, editor, podcaster, and narrator whose fiction, non-fiction, and poetry have appeared in Latin American Literature Today, Lightspeed, and Goblin Fruit, among other places. Their editing work has won multiple awards including the Hugo Award. Julia is a co-host of This is Why We’re Like This, a podcast about the movies we watch in childhood that shape our lives, for better or for worse. They’ve narrated stories for Escape Pod, Podcastle, Pseudopod, and Cast of Wonders. They’re @omgjulia on Twitter.

Frequently Asked Questions

How many players can be on a team? 

Maximum 12 players per team, including captain(s). There is no minimum number of players for a team, but we recommend small groups join up with another attending team. Your group can stay together by indicating each other in the notes field during your payment process or emailing us at communications@clarionwest.org. You can also buy your tickets together.

What if I want to play with a friend? 

If you wish to play with a friend who is paying separately, place their name in the notes field when you make your payment. You can also pay for up to 12 players together at a time. 

How will we play trivia online? 

Trivia Night will be played via Zoom. Upon entry, we will check-in with you and place you in a break-out room with your team. You will spend the majority of the event in the break-out room. Teams will watch questions streamed live and fill answers via online forms. Your Zoom link and more specific information will be shared prior to the event.

Can we Google the responses? 

Of course not. Trivia Night is a community builder, and we believe in a fair and healthy competition. The prize is bragging rights! Please play by the rules and do not google your responses. We are relying on the honor system that your team will come up with the answers using only the power of your combined knowledge. 

Are there minimum age requirements to enter the event?

For the best experience for all, we recommend age 18 and older. If you have a question about the minimum age requirement, please email us at communications@clarionwest.org.

How can I contact the organizer with any questions?

Please email any questions to communications@clarionwest.org. We respond faster to emails than questions via social media channels. 

Is it ok if the name on my ticket or registration doesn’t match the person who attends?

If you are signing up for someone else or using a name different than the one on your payment account, please indicate this during registration or send an email to communications@clarionwest.org and tell us your information and the name, email, and contact information for the person you are registering for. Clarion West does not share contact information with any other organization.

Accessibility

Clarion West is using Zoom for our online programs, classes, and workshops. We always make Zoom’s auto-generated closed captions available for all of our online sessions and live captioners for streaming events.

Requesting an interpreter: If the class is discussion-intensive or uses features that make the auto-generated captions impossible (for example, if a class uses breakout rooms), a live captioner or ASL interpreter can be requested. We ask that students request a live captioner or interpreter 3–5 business days before the class date. For live captioners, we are currently partnering with VITAC Internet Captioning Services.

Chat and closed caption transcripts can be sent to you after the class. We ask our instructors to provide reading materials and slides in advance, whenever possible. If you have specific needs or requests for your instructor, please send in your request 3–5 business days before the class date.

If you have questions about the accessibility of the workshop or have other concerns, please contact info@clarionwest.org

I don’t want to play, but I’ll make a donation to Clarion West, where can I donate? 

Thank you! We appreciate that very much. You can make a donation directly here

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