Introducing Fireside’s Staff
So it hasn’t been a secret, but we’ve never done a formal introduction of Fireside’s staff. I spent a lot of time doing Fireside mostly on my own, but having these folks on board has made things a lot smoother and less stressful, and they make up for my weak spots, as well as enhancing things.
Pablo Defendini
Design & Technology Director
Pablo has been involved in Fireside one way or the other since the beginning. I hired him to design ebooks for the first few issues, and since then his involvement has grown every year. He designed the past two versions of our website (and is hard at work on a pretty damn cool update). He has also taken on the roles of art director and master of all things digital. His advice and counsel have been invaluable in building Fireside into a more professional, polished, and all-around awesome organization. He also runs a damn good meeting.
BIO: Pablo Defendini is a designer from Puerto Rico. He mostly works on user experience and product design and strategy for websites and mobile apps, with a little book design on the side. Occasionally he’ll do some illustration and some printmaking for his own amusement. He also gets really nerdy and technical exploring new forms for building digital comics out of HTML and CSS. He helped launch tor.com and ran it for its first few years, before moving on to work for companies that sit in the overlap between publishing and technology, like Open Road Media and O’Reilly.
Elsa Sjunneson-Henry
Assistant Editor
Elsa has been an important part of Fireside for years too, first as a friend whose advice I valued, then as a submissions reader, and now as our assistant editor. Elsa will be taking the lead role managing submissions periods, as well as working with me on choosing stories for issues and many other editorial tasks. She has a sharp take on fiction, and always makes me think of things from angles I hadn’t considered. She’s teaching a Writing the Other class on Deaf and Blind characters that you can sign up for RIGHT NOW.
BIO: Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a half-blind, half-deaf, half- Scandinavian writer and editor from Seattle, Washington. She’s got an MA in Women’s History, and she uses that to write about disability and media. She’s enough of a nerd that she ended up making games writing a large part of her freelance career. You can find her yelling about disability and fiction in many places on the internet, including Feminist Sonar, her blog on the intersection of disability issues, gender, sexuality, and media. She’s the author of A Place Out of Time and is also included in the Ghost in the Cogs anthology. Reports indicate she’s been called a dragon more than once. Supposedly that’s a good thing. Currently, she lives in New Jersey with her delightfully quirky husband, a hound dog, and two cats who may hate her. You can find Elsa on Twitter @snarkbat.
Brian White
Editor & Publisher
Ugh, Pablo says I have to introduce myself too. I started Fireside in 2012 with a Kickstarter and a prayer to the Old Ones, and things have gone pretty well! My role is finder of books and stories, editor of those things, and general editorial director. I’m also oddly good at connecting people, though often that’s through mutual trolling of me. So I’ve got that going for me I guess.
BIO: Brian White has been a newspaper journalist for over a decade, most of that in various copy-editing roles. He spends a lot of time on Twitter as @talkwordy, where you can generally find him yelling about clowns, hedgehogs, or bigots. He lives around Boston with his amazing wife and two cats that are generally also amazing, though murderous.
