FIYAHCON 2020: Full Schedule

Welcome to FIYAHCON!

You must be a paid registered attendee who received an invite in order to view links and customize your agenda. Tickets for the full weekend’s content are now SOLD OUT. Fringe/Friday-Only ticket holders will not be able to customize their agendas here, but can expect an email the week of the event with instructions on how to access their content.

If you purchased a paid ticket but have not received your invite from Sched.com yet, please email team(at)theconvention.fiyahlitmag.com

8:00pm EDT

Superheroes Around the World

Every culture has its superheroes, but their form function can vary dramatically under the spandex. Come hear our panel discuss superheroes as moral paragons, propaganda, agents of revisionist history... that time Spiderman used a giant robot to fight aliens.

Moderators

Brandon O'Brien

Brandon O’Brien is a writer, performance poet, teaching artist and game designer from Trinidad and Tobago. His work has been shortlisted for the 2014 Alice Yard Prize for Art Writing and the 2014 and 2015 Small Axe Literary Competitions, and is published in Strange Horizons, Reckoning... Read More →

Guests

Fran Wilde

Author

Fran Wilde’s novels and short stories have been finalists for four Nebula awards, two Hugo Awards, and a World Fantasy Award. They include her Nebula/Andre Norton- and Compton Crook-winning debut novel, Updraft (Tor, 2015); its sequels, Cloudbound and Horizon; the double-starred... Read More →

Iori Kusano

Iori Kusano is an Asian American writer and Extremely Ordinary Office Gremlin living in Tokyo. They are a graduate of Clarion West 2017 and their fiction has previously appeared in Apex Magazine. Find them on Twitter @IoriKusano, or at kusanoiori.com.Pronouns she/they, name is pronounced ee-oh-ree... Read More →

Charles Tan

Charles Tan is the editor of Lauriat: A Filipino-Chinese Speculative Fiction Anthology, and the co-editor of Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 9. His fiction has appeared in publications such as The Digest of Philippine Genre Stories, Philippine Speculative Fiction and the a... Read More →

Friday October 16, 2020 8:00pm - 8:50pm EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT CONFIRMED
RESERVATION REQUIRED No
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-1

9:00pm EDT

My Skin Isn't Caramel, My Eyes Aren't Chocolate: Colorism Among Us

Many mixed-race people have complicated feelings over passing as a member of the racial majority. In some colonized countries, skin whitening products are worth billions. Often, in addition to racism, many of us have been treated differently by our own people based on how we look. How, then, can we as writers avoid colorism in our own writing? Hint: don't use food descriptions.

Moderators

Vida Cruz

Vida Cruz is a Filipina fantasy and science fiction writer, editor, artist, and tarot reader. Her short fiction has been published or is forthcoming from Strange Horizons, PodCastle, Expanded Horizons, and various anthologies. She is a 2018 Tiptree Fellow and in 2019, she published... Read More →

Guests

Subodhana Wijeyeratne

Subodhana Wijeyeratne is a writer and researcher living and working in Tokyo, Japan. His dissertation, Red Sun Rising, charts the origins and development of Japan’s space program from the 1920s onwards. His broader interests include the impact of technological change on social relations... Read More →

Kate Osias

Kate Osias believes that love, chocolate and the right kind of madness can save the world. She has won five Don Carlos Palanca Memorial Awards for Literature, the Gig Book Contest, Canvas Story Writing Contest, the 10th Romeo Forbes Children's Storywriting Competition, and the Nick... Read More →

Chinelo Onwualu

Chinelo Onwualu is a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto. She's the non-fiction editor of Anathema, a speculative magazine for queer people of colour, and co-founder of Omenana, a magazine of African Speculative Fiction. She's also former chief spokesperson for the African... Read More →

Jordan Ifueko

Jordan Ifueko is the New York Times Bestselling author of the YA fantasy RAYBEARER series. She's a fan of fairy tales with lots of shea butter and 4c curls, and takes payment in plates of fried plantain.

Friday October 16, 2020 9:00pm - 9:50pm EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT PENDING
RESERVATION REQUIRED No
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-2

12:00am EDT

Re-imagining Magic

A magic system needs limitations rules to function... or does it? Is magic a system, a force, or an entity? Can your magic solve problems, or does it only cause them? Authors on this panel will discuss how they handle magic within their own work as well as the overall role of magic within fantasy narratives.

Moderators

Samit Basu

Samit Basu is an Indian novelist, film director and screenwriter. His current/upcoming work is a novel, The City Inside, to be published by Tor.com in 2022. It was published in India in 2020 as Chosen Spirits, an anti-dystopian novel set in Delhi in the late 2020s, and was shortlisted... Read More →

Guests

Vida Cruz

Cassie Hart

Cassie Hart is a Māori/Pākehā author of speculative fiction from New Zealand. She predominantly writes urban fantasy/paranormal romance, rural/small town fantasy/suspense and horror. She has self published a number of titles under a pen name, and her first traditional release... Read More →

Emma Mieko Candon

Escaped academic Emma Mieko Candon edits for Seven Seas and writes about traumatized robots, hungry ghosts, and queers doing sweet kick-flips. She lives in Hawaii with her wife and two cats in an apartment increasingly haunted by her own Japanese ghost hair. Find her at editoremm... Read More →

Jordan Ifueko

Saturday October 17, 2020 12:00am - 12:50am EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT PENDING
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-2

2:00am EDT

Should I Italicize That?

It's the eternal struggle: why do we italicize takoyaki but not taco? What counts as a loanword? Do italics highlight distinctive aspects of cultures settings, or do they exoticize it? Should we italicize anything at all? Panelists will share how they approach this problem within their own work, including how to discuss it with editors agents.

Moderators

Iori Kusano

Guests

Shiv Ramdas

Shiv Ramdas is an Indian writer of Tamil and Sikh heritage. His short speculative fiction has been nominated for the Hugo and Nebula awards and has appeared in publications such as Strange Horizons, Fireside Fiction, Podcastle and others. He has spent several years hosting radio shows... Read More →

Zen Cho

Zen Cho is the author of the Sorcerer to the Crown novels and a novella, The Order of the Pure Moon Reflected in Water, as well as the short story collection Spirits Abroad. She is a Hugo, Crawford and British Fantasy Award winner, and a finalist for the Locus and Astounding Awards.My... Read More →

Victor Fernando R. Ocampo

Victor Fernando R. Ocampo is a Singapore-based Filipino writer. He is the author of the International Rubery Book Award shortlisted The Infinite Library and Other Stories (Math Paper Press, 2017) and Here be Dragons (Canvas Press, 2015), which won the Romeo Forbes Children's Story... Read More →

Yukimi Ogawa

Yukimi Ogawa lives in a small town in Tokyo where she writes in English but never speaks it. Her stories can be found in such places as Clarkesworld, F&SF and Strange Horizons. Her name, Yukimi, can probably be pronounced like you-key-mee...

Saturday October 17, 2020 2:00am - 2:50am EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT CONFIRMED
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-1

3:00am EDT

Different, But the Same: Writing from the Diaspora vs. Writing Locally

Being in different places can vastly affect your perspective of any one issue, even if you share the same ethnicity as the other party. What would diaspora writers like sourcelanders to know? What would sourceland writers like the diaspora to know? What common misconceptions would both parties like to debunk? What challenges responsibilities are faced by both types? This panel counts the ways.

Moderators

L Chan

L CHAN hails from Singapore. He spends most of his time wrangling a team of two dogs, Mr Luka and Mr Telly. His work has appeared in places like Translunar Travellers Lounge, Podcastle, the Dark and he was a finalist for the 2020 Eugie Foster Memorial Award. He tweets occasionally... Read More →

Guests

Shingai Njeri

Attendee

Shingai Njeri Kagunda (She/her) is an Afrofuturist freedom dreamer, Swahili sea lover, and Femme Storyteller hailing from Nairobi, Kenya. She is currently pursuing a Literary Arts MFA at Brown University. Shingai's work has appeared or will appear in Omenana, The Elephant, FANTASY... Read More →

Samit Basu

Zen Cho

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Jembefola Press

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki is an African speculative fiction writer and editor in Nigeria. He won the Nebula award and is a multiple Hugo award finalist. He has also won the Otherwise, Nommo, and British Fantasy awards and has been a finalist in the WFA, Locus, BSFA, BFA & Sturgeon... Read More →

Saturday October 17, 2020 3:00am - 3:50am EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT PENDING
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-2

4:00am EDT

The Many Flavors of Worldbuilding: Food in SFF

Food can tell you a lot about the culture behind it: how when it was made, how it's ritualized, how ingredients can dictate one's place in society. It can tell you a lot about the foreign culture imbibing it, too—specifically, their attitudes toward anything foreign. Join our panel of authors as they discuss how they build worlds (or imply them) using food in their fiction.

Moderators

Toni Wi

Toni Wi is a Māori (Ngāti Maniapoto) writer and editor from Aotearoa, New Zealand. She writes flash fiction and is working on a novel about indigenous futurism.Her work has appeared in Takahē, Mayhem, Flash Frontier, and the Year's Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy... Read More →

Guests

Emad El-Din Aysha

freelance

I'm an academic researcher, freelance journalist, translator and author of science fiction currently residing in Cairo, Egypt. I was born to Arabic parents in the United Kingdom and hold a British as well as an Egyptian passport and completed my post-graduate education also in the... Read More →

Dean Alfar

Dean Francis Alfar (Philippines) is a Filipino author and advocate of speculative fiction. His books include the novel Salamanca (Anvil); short fiction collections The Kite of Stars and Other Stories (Anvil), How to Traverse Terra Incognita (Visprint), East of the Sun and Other... Read More →

Nikki Alfar

Nikki Alfar is a wife, mother, fictionist, dancer, kickboxer, knitter, and origami folder. While she has yet to receive acclaim for folding, knitting, boxing, dancing, mothering, or wifing – go figure – she has managed to cadge repeated recognition out of the Palanca, Nick Joaquin... Read More →

Rafeeat Aliyu

Rafeeat Aliyu is a writer and documentary filmmaker. Her short stories have been published in Strange Horizons, Nightmare, Expound and Omenana. She is a Clarion West Graduate (2018).Pronouns are she/her.

Saturday October 17, 2020 4:00am - 4:50am EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT CONFIRMED
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-1

5:00am EDT

Destroy All Empires: The Postcolonial/Anticolonial in SFF

Can SFF get away from its addiction to empires? if it can't, are there searingly fresh ways to depict empires? Spoiler alert: there are. Just ask our panelists from previously colonized nations how they feel about the subject depict it in their work—from upending empires to subverting them to doing away with them entirely.

Moderators

Subodhana Wijeyeratne

Guests

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

Author, Senior Researcher, LIRNEasia

Yudhanjaya is a researcher with the Big Data team at LIRNEasia. His work covers hate speech and bots on social networks, artificial language generation, and the analysis of international connectivity. He is the co-founder of Watchdog, a news verification service created to combat... Read More →

Zen Cho

Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki

Jembefola Press

Saturday October 17, 2020 5:00am - 5:50am EDT
The Mezzanine

Fringe, Craft

RELEASE CONSENT PENDING
DISCORD CHANNEL #the-mezzanine-2