The Imagination Hall of Fame was first announced during the Awards Ceremony at Imaginarium 2024. Eight members of the inaugural 2025 Inductee Class were also announced, with a formal induction and ceremony to take place at Imaginarium 2025.
The Imagination Hall of Fame recognizes individuals who have exhibited a high degree of excellence and achievement in their creative fields during the course of their careers, who embody the spirit and mission of the Imaginarium Convention, and who have demonstrated their support for other creatives, whether through teaching, mentoring, or providing developmental or professional opportunities.
The eight members of the 2025 Imagination Hall of Fame Inductee Class announced are featured below.
Imagination Hall of Fame 2025 Inductee Class
About Tony Acree
Tony Acree is an award-winning publisher, novelist, and screenwriter. He lives near Louisville, Kentucky with his wife, twins, two female dogs, two female cats, and says the way the goldfish looks at him, he’s sure she’s female, too.
Dark Harbor Pictures will be producing two streaming shows, one based on his Victor McCain thrillers, and the other on his Samantha Tyler thrillers. In addition, his screenplay, Songs of Bloody Harlan has been optioned for the silver screen by Jamezz Hampton and 1209 Productions. His publishing house, Hydra Publications, won the Jason Sizemore Award for best small press, and Publisher of the Year by the AOF Megafest and Conquering Disabilities w/Film International Film Festival.
His screenplay, The Hand of God, co-written by Sarah Gardiner, won Best Horror Screenplay at The LA Film Awards.
His first solo screenplay, Songs of Bloody Harlan, took Best Long Format Screen Play at the Imaginarium Convention Independent Film Festival.
About Arlan Andrews, Sr.
A retired engineer with experience in missiles, nukes, and high-tech private ventures, Arlan Andrews, Sr., is a Hugo-nominated author who has published hundreds of short science fiction and fantasy stories, non-fiction articles and books, and a dozen science fiction novels.
He founded and leads a science fiction think tank, SIGMA, which provides futurism consulting to the US government. Arlan has an active interest in space travel and advanced technologies and an equal fascination with ancient civilizations and their unexplained accomplishments.
His most famous observation in print is probably “The first true spaceship will take off and land the way God and Robert Heinlein intended…” (Although Elon Musk might have an opinion on that.)
About Chasity Bowlin
USA Today Best Seller, Winner of the 2019 Romance Through the Ages Award for Georgian/Regency Romance, 2020 RONE Award winner, 2021 RONE Award Winner, 2021 Raven Award Winner, and 2021 Imadjinn Award for Best Romance Novel, Chasity Bowlin is the author of multiple bestselling historical romance novels, both independently and with Dragonblade Publishing. She lives in central Kentucky with her husband, their adorable son, and a menagerie of animals. She loves writing, loves traveling and enjoys incorporating tidbits of her actual vacations into her books. She is an avid Anglophile, loving all things British, but specifically all things Regency.
Growing up in Tennessee, spending as much time as possible with her doting grandparents, soap operas were a part of her daily existence, followed by back to back episodes of Scooby Doo. Her path to becoming a romance novelist was set when, rather than simply have her Barbie dolls cruise around in a pink convertible, they time traveled, hosted lavish dinner parties and one even had an evil twin locked in the attic.
About Michael Knost
Michael Knost is a Bram Stoker Award®-winning editor and author of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and supernatural thrillers. He has written in various genres and helmed several anthologies.
His Writers Workshop of Horror won the 2009 Bram Stoker Award® in England for superior achievement in non-fiction. His critically acclaimed Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy is an Amazon #1 bestseller. His novel, Return of the Mothman was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award® for superior achievement in first novel. His Author’s Guide to Marketing with Teeth was a finalist for the Bram Stoker Award® for superior achievement in non-fiction.
Return of the Mothman was also recently made into a feature film, that premiered in 2022.
Michael is a member of the inaugural 2025 Inductee Class for the Imagination Hall of Fame, and he is the presenter of the annual Michael Knost Wings Award.
Michael has taught writing classes and workshops at several colleges, conventions, and online, and currently resides in Chapmanville, West Virginia with his wife, daughter, and a zombie goldfish. To find out more, visit www.MichaelKnost.com.
About Lee Pennington
LEE PENNINGTON LEE PENNINGTON is the author of 23 books including I Knew a Woman (1977) Thigmotropism (1993) and Appalachian Newground (2016)–each nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. His book, Daughters of Leda (2017) was selected as a finalist for “Best Book of Poetry published in 2017” by the American Book Fest. His Songs of Bloody Harlan was reprinted and re-released in 2019. His most recent book (2019) is Segovia’s Fingernail. He has had over 1300 poem published in more than 300 magazines in America and abroad. He has had nine plays produced, wrote the script for The Moonshine War (MGM, 1970, starring Alan Alda, Richard Widmark, etc.), and has published thousands of poems, articles and short stories in everything from Playgirl to Mountain Life and Work. His novel, Moment of the Butterfly, is scheduled to be released by Hydra Publications in the near future.
Beginning in 1990, through his video production company, JoLe Productions (joleproductions.com), Lee, along with his late wife, Joy, produced 21 documentaries including In Search of the Mudmen (1990), Wales: History in Bondage (1995), and Secret of the Stones (1998), Eyes that Look at the Sky: The Mystery of Easter Island (2001), The Mound Builders (2001), The Serpent Fort: Solving the Mystery of Fort Mountain, Georgia (2005), Let Me Not Drown on the Waters: Fred Rydholm, Michigan’s “Mr. Copper.” After Joy’s death, Lee has produced five more documentaries for a total of 26 : Some Days You Clean, Some Days You Litter: The Amazing Warner Sizemore, 2012; Room To Fly: Anne Caudill’s Album, 2013; Bosnian Pyramids Hidden History, 2015; Seafaring Strangers: Vikings in America, Part I, 2016; and Gunung Padang: Monument to Atlantis, 2017.
Lee is a graduate Berea College in KY and the University of Iowa. He holds two Honorary Doctor degrees: Doctor of Literature from World University, and Doctor of Philosophy in Arts from The Academy of Southern Arts and Letters. He taught for nearly 40 years, the last 32 as Professor of English and creative writing at University of Kentucky Jefferson Community College until he retired in 1999.
In 1983, the Kentucky State Legislature named him Poet Laureate, a lifetime appointment.
He has traveled extensively (in all the United States, in all the Canadian Provinces except two, and in 96 foreign countries). For the past fifteen years, he has served as president of the Ancient Kentucke Historical Association, a group dedicated to the study and research of pre-Columbian contact in the Americas, especially Kentucky. He has visited all the continents including his final one, Antarctica in December 2022.
In 2013 the University of Louisville opened the Lee and Joy Pennington Cultural Heritage Gallery, named after Lee and his late wife. The gallery contains U of L’s most valuable works including the likes of first editions of Galileo, Copernicus, and Newton. It will house all of Lee’s writings, films, and many artifacts he’s collected traveling around the world.
Three films are presently in the works about Lee: one, a documentary on his life, and, two, a movie about his Harlan County, KY teaching experience where he was run out of town and had contracts taking out on his head–all because of a book of poetry his students published in 1967. The third film is a series called The Story Behind the Story of Lee Pennington had its premiere at the University of Louisville in June, and won Runner Up Award for Best Documentary at the Imaginarium Indy Film Festival. In 2022 a press focused on publishing only poetry was named after him—Pennington Press, a division of Hydra Publications. In December 2022, !Sonablast Records released his CD album, Songs of Bloody Harlan. In 2023 his Jole Productions received the Cultural Video Award from Louisville Awards Program. In 2024 The Louisville Awards Program named Jole Productions to the Cultural Video Hall of Fame. He was also selected by the Imaginarium Convention to be inducted into the 2025 Hall of Fame.
He presently lives in Kratz House, a designated historic home, in Middletown, KY with his lady, Jill Baker, an artist who has illustrated several of his books.
About Virginia Smith
Bestselling author Virginia Smith’s first novel was published in 2006. Since then, she’s written more than fifty books that have collected a satisfying number of accolades and awards, including two Holt Medallion Awards of Merit and a Library Journal top pic. Her book, GUILTY SECRETS, has been produced as a feature length film to be aired in the fall of 2024.
Murder–writing about it–is merely a hobby. She loves Jesus, her family, writing, and geeking around on the computer – in that order. She lives in central Kentucky with a barky Maltese named Max. Learn more about Ginny and her books at www.virginiasmith.org.
Learn more about Ginny and her books at www.virginiasmith.org, or get to know her on Facebook where she spends way too much time – https://www.facebook.com/ginny.p.smith
About Tim Waggoner
Tim Waggoner’s first novel came out in 2001, and since then he’s published over fifty novels and seven collections of short stories. He writes original dark fantasy and horror, as well as media tie-ins. He’s written tie-in fiction based on Supernatural, Grimm, The X-Files, Alien, Doctor Who, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Transformers, among others, and he’s written novelizations for films such as Halloween Kills, Resident Evil: The Final Chapter and Kingsman: The Golden Circle. His articles on writing have appeared in Writer’s Digest, The Writer, The Writer’s Chronicle. He’s the author of the acclaimed horror-writing guide Writing in the Dark, which won the Bram Stoker Award in 2021. He won another Bram Stoker Award in 2021 in the category of short nonfiction for his article “Speaking of Horror,” and in 2017 he received the Bram Stoker Award in Long Fiction for his novella The Winter Box. In addition, he’s been a multiple finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award and the Scribe Award, and a one-time finalist for the Splatterpunk Award. His fiction has received numerous Honorable Mentions in volumes of Best Horror of the Year, and he’s had several stories selected for inclusion in volumes of Year’s Best Hardcore Horror. His work has been translated into Russian, Portuguese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Hungarian, and Turkish.
In addition to writing, he’s also a full-time tenured professor who teaches creative writing and composition at Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio.
About Michael Williams
The author of fifteen novels, a number of stories and poems, and the late, lamented “Mythical Realism” travel blog, Michael Williams has been writing and publishing over the last thirty years. Michael Williams has written a number of strange novels, from the early Weasel’s Luck and Galen Beknighted in the best-selling Dragonlance series to the lyrical and experimental Arcady, singled out for praise by Locus and Asimov’s magazines.
His most recent work is the acclaimed City Quartet, centered on a city both realistic and mythical: in Trajan’s Arch, stories fold into stories and a boy grows up with ghostly mentors; Vine: An Urban Legend mingles Greek tragedy and urban legend, as a local dramatic production in a small city goes humorously, then horrifically, awry; Dominic’s Ghosts takes up the story of a son in search of his father in the midst of a murky conspiracy involving a suspicious scholar, a Himalayan legend, and subliminal clues from a silent film festival. Tattered Men is the account of a disheveled biographer, writing the life story of a homeless man who may have been more than he ever seemed.
Williams was born in Louisville, Ky, and spent much of his childhood in the south central part of the state, the red-dirt gothic home of the Appalachian foothills and stories of Confederate guerillas. Through good luck and a roundabout journey he made his way through New England, New York, Wisconsin, Britian, and Ireland, and has ended more or less where he began. He has a Ph.D in Humanities, and taught at the University of Louisville until 2022, where he focused on the Modern Fantastic in fiction and film. He is married to Rhonda Williams and they have two grown sons.
He is currently at work on a long narrative poem set in the world of the City Quartet. Because what’s a quartet without a fifth?