We are very excited to announce our ICFA 44 Guest of Honor, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and our ICFA 44 Guest Scholar, Dr. Isiah Lavender III!

ICFA 44 Guest of Honor – Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki 

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an African speculative fiction writer and editor in Nigeria. He has won the Nommo award for Best Speculative Fiction by an African twice, both for Short Story and Novella, as well as the Otherwise and British Fantasy Awards. He is the first African to have won the Nebula Award for Best Novelette with his climate fiction story O2 Arena, for which he is also a BSFA, BFA and Nommo Award finalist, and the first African to be a Hugo Award Best Novelette finalist. He is the first African editor to be a finalist in the Hugo Award Best Editor categories and the first BIPOC editor to be a finalist in both the Hugo Award Editing and Fiction categories in the same year. He has been a finalist for the WFA, Locus, BSFA, Sturgeon, and This Is Horror Awards. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in and are forthcoming in Tordotcom, Asimov’s, Uncanny Magazine, Apex Magazine, Strange Horizons, Galaxy’s Edge, and NBC, among other venues. He edited and published the first ever Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction anthology, a Hugo, WFA, Locus, and BFA finalist, and the Pan-African non-fiction anthology, Bridging Worlds: Global Conversations on Creating Pan-African Speculative Literature in a Pandemic. He co-edited the BFA-winning Dominion anthology and the Africa Risen anthology, which has a starred review from Publishers Weekly.  He guest-edited the collections window of Interstellar Flight Press and has slush read for Podcastle, Strange Horizons, Cosmic Roots, Eldritch Shores, and other publications. He is the founder of Jembefola Press and the Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award for Disability in Speculative Fiction. He co-organized the Discon 3 African stream and 2021 Nommo Award ceremony, and is a Guest of Honour at the 2022 Can*Con. He is the first African-born Black writer and the youngest writer to be Guest of Honor at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts.  You can find him on Twitter https://twitter.com/penprince_ and on his website https://odekpeki.com.

Please follow these links to immerse yourself in the works of Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki:

O2 Arena: https://apex-magazine.com/short-fiction/o2-arena/

Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction: https://jembefola.com/the-L-best-african-speculative-fiction-2021-by-oghenechovwe-donald-ekpeki/

Bridging Worlds: https://jembefola.com/bridging-worlds-global-conversations-on-creating-pan-african-speculative-literature-in-a-pandemic-cover-and-toc-reveal/

The Emeka Walter Dinjos Memorial Award For Disability In Speculative Fiction: https://file770.com/announcing-the-emeka-walter-dinjos-memorial-award-for-disability-in-speculative-fiction/

Discon 3 African Stream: https://file770.com/new-african-program-stream-distinguishes-disconiii-world-science-fiction-convention/

Publishers Weekly starred review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/9781250833006

Africa Risen pre-order: https://publishing.tor.com/africarisen-shereereneethomas/9781250833006/

“Destiny Delayed” in the May/June issue of Asimov’s – https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Kl0Iks1M8xk-zMC-FE3Xl3FsNf8Ce4f9/view?usp=drivesdk

Guest Scholar – Dr. Isiah Lavender III 

Isiah Lavender III is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. His books include Race in American Science Fiction (Indiana UP, 2011), Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction (UP of Mississippi, 2014 and 2017 respectively), Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (Ohio State UP, 2019), and Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century (Ohio State UP, 2020), co-edited with Lisa Yaszek. His interview collection Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson is forthcoming from UP of Mississippi in early 2023. He is currently hard at work on The Routledge Handbook of CoFuturisms, co-edited with Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay, Grace Dillon, and Taryne Jade Taylor as well as his manuscript-in-progress Critical Race Theory and Science Fiction. If you would like to know more about Dr. Lavender, check out https://narrativeencounters.aau.at/how-reading-shapes-us-isiah-lavender/

The title of Dr. Lavender’s ICFA Guest Scholar presentation shall be “Imaginary Amendments and Executive Orders: Race in United States Science Fiction.” 

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Dear IAFA Members,

As you know, the IAFA Executive Board has been gathering information in preparation for making the decision as to the future of the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts. In particular, we wanted to address concerns that had been vocalized to a number of us that our continued presence in Florida–a state whose government is actively passing laws and enacting policies that are anathematic to the values that an academic organization like ours holds to–was problematic at best.

We began the process by researching locations that might be amenable to us. For more information on this process, please review the FAQ found on our website: https://iaftfita.wildapricot.org/ICFAFAQs

What we discovered is that there are limited options due to our size and shape; rather than repeat the specifics here, we refer you to the email we sent out prior to the town hall meetings on May 24, 2022.

As part of this information seeking, we held three town hall meetings with our membership, at various days and times, encouraging input and ideas. We provided a Google document whereby people could additionally comment, including anonymously if they so chose. As a result of these conversations, we provided a survey, asking people for their input.

The overwhelming response to these inquiries has been that people prefer to continue to meet at the Orlando Airport Marriott Lakeside, and would like to have IAFA take steps to make our presence have greater meaning to the Florida academic community at large in a more tangible way.

This past week, the Executive Board voted to continue our relationship with the Marriott through 2026. We also decided to create a liaison position that will spearhead a task force to develop ideas and methods by which we may be an ally in Florida to all those who oppose the state’s current political drift and systemic injustice. To give you a sampling of some of the things we discussed: grants or brain trust support for creating campus organizations, guest lectures and author readings on campuses, and assistance and participation with organization of special campus events.

We are also actively seeking ways that we can support or co-sponsor a conference on the West Coast; in fact LA’s EagleCon has already reached out to us seeking this very thing. This is in recognition not only of how much our organization would benefit from a West Coast presence but also as part of a process of expanding the overall visibility and availability of IAFA that we are beginning next month with our co-sponsoring of the conference that the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Fantasy and the Fantastic is holding.

Thank you for your continued support of IAFA. If you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to reach out to us.

Pawel Frelik, President, IAFA (iafa.president@fantastic-arts.org) & Jeri Zulli, Conference Director, IAFA iafa.confchair@fantastic-arts.org

On behalf of the IAFA Board

Please welcome the 2022-2024 Student Caucus Board!

Representative Andrew Erickson is doctoral researcher and instructor in American Studies at Europa-Universität Flensburg and Editorial Assistant for Amerikastudien / American Studies. Recent publications focus on anti-intellectualism and counterfactual history, and on the critical posthumanism of Black American disaster fiction. His current dissertation project understands speculative fiction by Black makers through the lens of the postapocalypses of American enslavement and settler colonialism. Research interests include postcolonialism, science and speculative fiction, posthumanism, and digital humanities.

Vice-Representative Amélie Hurkens is a Ph.D. candidate in American Literature at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research is centred around the representation of diversity in popular culture and genre fiction, including superhero comics, YA literature, and science fiction and fantasy. She combines literary studies with data inquiries into the industries, institutions and corporate culture encompassing the works she is studying. This ranges from the Walt Disney Company and its subsidiary Marvel Comics to the Hugo Awards. She has published before on world literature and its industries and institutions.

Undergraduate Representative Anna Maria Grzybowska has recently graduated with an MA degree in American Studies from the University of Warsaw, and is further pursuing a degree in Psychology. With her dedication to understanding various (not-only-)human ways of experiencing the world, her research focuses on representations of human psyche—her recent thesis exploring the confluence of psychological violence and SF film—as well as its formation in collision with complexity of nonhuman beings within the realms of speculative fiction. Her current research project investigates how animals figure within cultural speculations of the worlds to come, with a particular focus on narrative transformations (or consolidations) of the animal-industrial complex.

And yours truly will transition to serving as the immediate past representative.

Their terms will start officially on August 1 and I look forward to everything they are going to do in the next two years.

Samantha Baugus, SCIAFA Representative