PHILIP K DICK FESTIVAL 2019

Dave, who lives in the Colorado Rockies, is hosting the 2nd Philip K. Dick Festival in Fort Morgan in 2019. He also hosted the 2017 PKD Festival in Fort Morgan and the 2010 Festival in Nederland, Colorado. In addition to founding Wide Books with Henri Wintz in 2012, Dave has been a PKD fan since 1984 when he first read EYE IN THE SKY. He contributed to The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter and, in 1993, published the zine For Dickheads Only. He has contributed many articles to PKD OTAKU and, in 2007, published PINK BEAM: A Philip K. Dick Companion (Lulu Press) which has become a standard reference for fans and scholars. His other publications can be found on the Wide Books website. www.wide-books.com

David has studied the life and work of Philip K Dick for the last twenty years. He wrote his Masters Thesis on PKD in 2005 and started a Dick-centric blog in 2007. Gill has interviewed Dick's ex-wives Anne Dick and Kleo Mini, along with "Dark-Haired Girl" Linda Levy and Tim Powers. Gill worked the 2011 publication of THE EXEGESIS OF PHILIP K. DICK, wrote the intro to the Tachyon edition of Anne Dick's memoir, and organized the 2012 "Dick-Fest" at San Francisco State University where he teachers composition and literature.

Henri is a free-lance Science Writer and Editor and lives in California. His interest in Philip K. Dick began in France when he, like many PKD fans, read one of Dick's novels and was caught forever by the imagination of this great writer. His website pkdickbooks.com is a prime source for bibliographic information and Philip K. Dick cover art with over 2000 editions from all around the world displayed. In concert with David Hyde, Henri began Wide Books in 2012 and has published two Philip K Dick bibliographies (PRECIOUS ARTIFACTS - The PKD Novels, 1955-2012 and PRECIOUS ARTIFACTS 2 - The PKD Short Stories, 1952 - 2014) and other Philip K. Dick related books. PRECIOUS ARTIFACTS 3 - The French Editions, will be published by Wide Books in 2019.

Tessa is the fifth and last wife of Philip K. Dick. She has been writing professionally since high school. She focused on journalism, but Phil encouraged her to write fiction when he read her first short story. After teaching English and Communications at Chapman University for 12 years, Tessa retired to a small mountain community where she continues writing and volunteers in the community through the Lioness club, a part of Lions International. Her surrealist novel 'The Darkening of the Light' was inspired by Philip K. Dick’s VALIS trilogy. She has also published two memoirs about her husband, as well as several other books. Her books include: 'Philip K. Dick: Remembering Firebright' , 'Conversations with Philip K. Dick', ​'Tessa B. Dick: My Life on the Edge of Reality', ​'The Darkening of the Light' (a surrealist science fiction novel inspired by Philip K. Dick's VALIS trilogy), 'Fallen Angels' (a science fiction novel in which the survivors of an exploded planet seek refuge on their prison planet, Earth), 'Allegro’s Mushroom' (a review of John Allegro’s 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross', which was one of the sources for Philip K. Dick’s Exegesis), 'Murder Lies' (a murder mystery), and 'A Cookbook for the Kitchen Challenged'.​ Please visit Tessa's blog and Facebook page.

Erik is an author, podcaster, award-winning journalist, and independent scholar based in San Francisco. His wide-ranging work focuses on the intersection of alternative religion, media, and the popular imagination. He is the author, most recently, of Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica. He also wrote The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, a short critical volume on Led Zeppelin, and the celebrated TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information. Erik's scholarly and popular essays on music, technoculture, and spirituality have appeared in scores of books, magazines, and journals, and his writing has been translated into a dozen languages. He explores the "cultures of consciousness" on his long-running weekly podcast Expanding Mind, on the Progressive Radio Network. Davis been interviewed by CNN, the BBC, public radio, and the New York Times. He graduated from Yale University, and earned his PhD in religious studies at Rice University. His next book, High Weirdness: Drugs, Visions, and Esoterica in the Seventies, will be out in the Spring of 2019 through MIT Press and Strange Attractor.

Andrew read his first Philip K. Dick novel is March 1982, unaware that Dick was then dying, and then sought out the rest of the oeuvre over the next decade. In 1991 he started a PhD, "Ontology and Ethics in Philip K. Dick" because he wanted to work out why the fiction played with his brain so much -- he never answered this question but did find a solution to the query, "If we don't know that anything is real, how should we treat other people?". In 2000 he published the Pocket Essentials Philip K. Dick, with a second edition in 2007. Among other articles, he has written on MARTIAN TIME SLIP and LIES, INC. He is managing editor of the academic journal Extrapolation and teaches media and film studies at Canterbury Christ Church University.

Frank is a "completist" fan who has read and collected Philip K. Dick since 1983, with a particular interest in experiencing the fiction in its originally published context. In 2014, Hollander published a short book titled YOUNG AUTHORS' CLUB: THE WARTIME ADOLESCENT WRITINGS OF PHILIP K DICK, collecting the stories and poems that appeared between 1942 to 1944 in Dick's local daily newspaper in Berkeley, California. Hollander is a regular contributor to the fanzine PKD OTAKU including his major bibliographic study in issue #38 (December 2018) called "JJ-182: If I Could Publish the Fiction Canon."

Nick grew up in the heart of Liverpool and still lives on Merseyside today. He has been interested in the ideas and fiction of Philip K. Dick since 1976. After subscribing to the PKDS Newsletter, he has contributed to various PKD fan magazines including For Dickheads Only, Radio Free PKD and PKD Otaku. He is the graphic designer who currently assembles and formats PKD Otaku. Nick has also designed book jackets for Tessa Dick and Dave Hyde. He is the author of two 500 page guides to Shakespeare plays ("What Happens in Shakespeare's King Lear" and "What Happens in Shakespeare's Macbeth"). Nick is fully qualified as an NLP Master Practitioner, Psychotherapeutic Counsellor and Clinical Hypnotherapist.

Amber has been a combination of two things her entire life: a dancer and a scholar. Starting at the age of three, she trained as a classical ballet dancer until a foot injury forced her to stop. For the last ten years, she has enjoyed teaching and performing tribal fusion belly dance in music venues, burlesque bars and quirky underground theaters in the San Francisco Bay Area. In January 2019, she relocated to beautiful Olympia, Washington where she hopes to continue belly dancing. When Amber is not dancing, she is voraciously reading. She earned her B.A. in English Literature at San Francisco State University in 2008 and has enjoyed working in bookstores and academic libraries for her entire adult life. Amber is a genuine PKD fanatic and truly feels a spiritual connection to his novels and short stories. For more information, please visit her website: BLACKHOODYGRRL: TRIBAL FUSION BELLY DANCE

Brent is New Orleans-based painter and musician originally from Fulton, IL. Houzenga earned his B.A. in printmaking from Western Illinois University and his MFA at the University of New Orleans in 2017. Houzenga's art has graced the walls of galleries in Warsaw, Chicago, Kansas City, Washington D.C., Portland, Los Angeles, Austin, Miami, and New Orleans. His show "Fire Department" at the Dubuque Museum of Art in Dubuque, Iowa, was exhibited beside one of America’s most treasured artists, Grant Wood. In 2012 he was commissioned to paint a portrait for Matthew McConaughey's personal collection. Houzenga is also a self-proclaimed Philip K. Dick scholar. Houzenga's work has been featured in publications such as Time Out Chicago, Art and Art Galleries of the South, Art+Design New Orleans, as well as the Rizzoli book Stickers: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art. He is the subject of the independent documentary film Brent Houzenga: Hybrid Pioneer.

A latecomer to the PKD party, Cliff started reading DR BLOODMONEY in 2014. A few years later (just in time for the first festival), he finished the last of the 44 novels on his list: THE GANYMEDE TAKEOVER. What kicked off this obsession was a chance viewing of a documentary on Netflix: The Gospel According to Philip K. Dick. Cliff was immediately struck by an intense feeling that he had to carry on the work—starting, of course, with reading that work. Cliff has been working as a web developer off and on since his first job at the turn of the century. He also holds a master's degree in theoretical linguistics and spent some time teaching English in Japan, delivering pizzas, and managing a college writing center. But ever since he saw that pink beam (on Netflix) he's kept a focus on his true calling: writing a subversive brand of surreal science fantasy that he's come to call “dreampunk”. More on this at CliffJonesJr.com.

Sean is Assistant Professor of Practice (Musicology) at the University of Southern California. A scholar primarily of twentieth-century popular music, Professor Nye received his PhD in Comparative Studies in Discourse and Society from the University of Minnesota in 2013. That same year, he joined the University of Southern California as a Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar in the Humanities, and later became an Assistant Professor of Practice. Beyond his work at USC, Nye has been a DAAD-Fellow at the Humbold Univerisität zu Berlin and a fellow in the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität Berlin. His articles, translations, and book reviews have appeared in academic journals, including Journal of Popular Music Studies, Cultural Critique, and German History. He has also published essays in edited collections, including Music in Television: Channels of Listening (Routledge, 2011) and The Pop Festival: History, Music, Media, Culture (Bloomsbury, 2015). More recently, he has published two articles on Kraftwerk and the history electronic dance and techno in Germany.