Eric Flint was born in southern California in 1947. Other than a few years in France, he spent most of his youth in Fresno and Los Angeles, attending UCLA during the late '60s and early '70s where he earned a bachelor's degree in history. He became politically active as a socialist during the early '70s left school for the blue collar world. Between 1974 and 1992 Eric held down just about every industrial job imaginable--from meat packer to glass blower--in just about every part of the country; most of the time still an activist for labor.

His writing career began in 1993 when his short story, Entropy, and the Strangler won L Ron Hubbard's Winter 1992 Writers of the Future contest. Following the short story, he and Richard Roach completed two more novels in that universe: The Philosophical Strangler and Forward the Mage. He completed his first solo work in 1993 entitled Mother of Demons which was published by Baen that same year.

Beginning in 1997, Eric began collaborating with David Drake on the first four installments of the Belisarius series for Baen Books. In 1999, however, he started work on another solo project about a modern-day West Virginian coal-mining town catapulted backward in time to 17th Century Germany which would become 1632, the first work of what is probably the most innovative and original alternate history epics of our time. Since its publication in February 2000, Eric's universe set in Germany during the Thirty Years War has taken on a life of its own spawning seven novels and numerous collections of short stories in the publication known as The Grantville Gazette.

Today, Eric lives in northern Indiana with his wife, Lucille and his daughter Elizabeth. We at Soonercon are very excited to have him as our guest of honor this year, and hope that you feel the same way.