Diane Turnshek

Diane Turnshek teaches college astronomy classes in Pittsburgh and has been named a Dark Sky Defender by the International Dark-sky Association. She has been on the Board of Directors for both SFWA and Parsec, Pittsburgh’s premier science fiction charitable organization. For nine years, she mentored graduate students at Seton Hill's MFA Writing Popular Fiction program. In the last three years, she has set up book signing events for over 300 authors and curated three space art galleries. She is the founder of Write or Die, a critique group running since 1996, Alpha, a teen writing workshop since 2002 and the CMU Speculative Fiction Lecture Series that began in 2014.

She created the Triangulation series of themed anthologies to be a training ground for local writers who wanted to take turns editing. She edited the first one in 2003 and the 2019 issue, Triangulation: Dark Skies. Her love of both astronomy and science fiction led her to crew the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, earn second place in the international Mars City Design competition and win the 2017 NASA Intel/HP competition to make life better for astronauts. Her latest project is to make a high resolution, nighttime, light pollution map of Pittsburgh for researchers.