Online advance registration for ICFA will continue through next Wednesday, 12 March 2014, 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time (UTC-05:00). Then we will shut down registration so that registration can finalize preparations.
This does not mean that people cannot register for the ICFA.
“On site” registration will open Wednesday, 19 March 2014. Day passes will also be available.
You may now view the Program of the 35th ICFA in .pdf form.
Hello, everyone!
Your dedicated Registrar, Valorie Ebert, would like for anyone who wishes to volunteer at this year’s conference to follow the link in this email and fill out the survey.
Thank you for your participation.
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1krBnXe7eswxCoIYfFdCAJOSVzuPP09NRQxtm29YDfVA/viewform
Hello Graduate Students,
I’m writing to let you all know that we still have FIVE open spots in the writing workshop with Sherryl Vint! If you’ve been putting off signing up, or thinking you missed your chance, please contact me at elizabeth-lundberg@uiowa.edu with answers to the following questions.
Thanks, and see you all in March!
Liz Lundberg
IAFA Student Caucus Co-Representative
—————
1) What is your name?
2) Which email address should we use to contact you?
3) What is your institutional affiliation, and who is your adviser?
4) At what stage are you in your graduate program?
5) What is your dissertation/thesis topic? (1-2 sentences)
6) What are some issues or problems in your writing you’d like to address? (1-2 sentences)
The winner of the 2014 Crawford Memorial Award, presented annually by the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for an outstanding first fantasy book, is Sofia Samatar for A Stranger in Olondria (Small Beer Press).
According to award administrator Gary K. Wolfe, the novel won broad support from the nominating committee. The other books included on this year’s Crawford shortlist are Yoon Ha Lee’s story collection Conservation of Shadows (Prime Books), Helene Wecker’s novel The Golem and the Jinni (Harper), and N.A. Sulway’s novel Rupetta (Tartarus Press).
Participating in this year’s nomination and selection process were Farah Mendlesohn, Cheryl Morgan, Ellen Klages, Graham Sleight, Liza Groen Trombi, Stacie Hanes, Karen Burnham, Candas Jane Dorsey, Jedediah Berry, and Jonathan Strahan. The award will be presented on March 22 during the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida. The IAFA’s Distinguished Scholarship Award will be presented to Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., and Vera Cuntz-Leng will receive the Jamie Bishop Memorial Award for a work of scholarship written in a language other than English.
Dear IAFA Members,
The Board would like to remind everyone that the hotel block is often booked well in advance of the conference, and if you haven’t secured a reservation you should do so as soon as possible.
Here’s a link to the website to help with that: http://fantastic-arts.org/annual-conference/the-hotel/ See you in March!
Stacie
The International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts presents an annual award and stipend to the graduate student submitting the most outstanding paper at the Association’s conference. The award, and a check for $250, will be presented to the winner at the Awards Banquet on Saturday evening. Students must submit their completed paper (3500 words, excluding bibliography) and verification of student status by February 1. You can find a list of past winners of the Graduate Student Award by following this link: http://fantastic-arts.org/awards/iafa-graduate-student-award/
CRITERIA & INSTRUCTIONS
1. The student will have had a paper accepted for presentation at the Conference. The paper submitted for the competition should be essentially the same as that presented at the conference. The maximum length for entries is 3500 words (about 2 pages over the recommended reading length of 8-9 pages). Students should be aware that funds are limited and that only one award will be given. The paper selected will be published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, and therefore must not have been previously published or submitted for publication elsewhere. Please note that acceptance of a paper for the Conference does not guarantee an award.
2. It is the responsibility of the student to send a copy of the paper by 1 February 2014 to the 1st VP Dale Knickerbocker (knickerbockerd@ecu.edu), as well as a copy of the letter of acceptance and verification of student status. Submissions may be in Word, RTF or PDF format.
3. The committee is looking for clear, coherent, and interesting writing. Essays should be solidly grounded in scholarly tradition, showing awareness of previous studies and of historical and theoretical contexts. Essays may use any suitable method of analysis, including historical and sociological approaches as well as those that originate in literary theory. Essays will be evaluated for their originality and quality of insight into the text.
The judges for the 2014 award will be:
Cassandra Bausman, University of Iowa
Neil Easterbrook, Texas Christian University
Farah Mendlesohn, Anglia Ruskin University
Nobel Prize-winning novelist Doris Lessing, 94, died at her home in London on November 17. Lessing was Guest of Honor for ICFA’s tenth annual conference in 1989, only a year after the conference relocated to Fort Lauderdale, and proved quickly to be one of ICFA’s most accessible and popular guests—working out on the hotel treadmills in the morning, hanging out by the pool in the afternoon, and inadvertently giving rise to one of the conference’s enduring anecdotes.
Lessing had expressed an interest in taking a short cruise while she was in Florida—meaning an ocean day cruise—but ICFA organizers instead booked her on a riverboat called the Jungle Queen, a notorious tourist trap largely for senior citizens, which made its way up the New River past various celebrity homes to a proprietary island, where a rather tacky rib dinner was served on picnic benches to the accompaniment of a live accordion band. Then-IAFA president Marshall Tymm was appalled, but Lessing, in good spirits, commented that she had learned a good deal more about Florida culture than she had expected.
A few IAFA members kept in touch with Lessing over the next few years, during which she continued to express her support for science fiction and fantasy both in her own writing and in interviews, revealing a knowledge of the field that ranged from Arthur C. Clarke to her friend Brian Aldiss (who had helped arrange her guest of honor appearance) to more contemporary writers like Greg Bear. Along with Isaac Bashevis Singer, she is one of two ICFA Guests of Honor to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Story and photo courtesy of Gary K. Wolfe
Charles Brown, Gary K. Wolfe, and Doris Lessing in 1989
Other posts on Doris Lessing:
NYTimes…
Telegraph…
Washington Post…
LA Times…
FT…
Bloomberg…
Margaret Atwood…
Justin Cartwright…
Eileen Battersby…
Words and words. Dear all, it’s time to think of offering a fantastic/scifi/horror poetry (no prose please!!) reading at the conference! As usual, we have two sessions, 1 hr and 1 1/2 hours, so aim to be able to have a maximum of twelve to fifteen people reading. This always fills up fast, so please let me know if you want to read.
Contact g.wisker@brighton.ac.uk.
See you there!
Gina Wisker
Martha Bartter, 80, a longtime member of IAFA and perhaps its longest serving treasurer from 1995-2003, died on June 18 following an automobile accident in Kirksville, Mo., where she was a retired professor of English at Truman State University. She and her husband Andy Hilgartner had been regular participants at ICFA since its early years.
Martha earned her PhD from the University of Rochester, and later taught at the University of Rochester, the Ohio State University at Marion, and Truman State University. She was the author of The Way to Ground Zero: The Atomic Bomb in American Science Fiction (1988), and edited the ICFA proceeding volume The Utopian Fantastic: Selected Essays from the Twentieth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (2004).