Date and Location

The 10th Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium will take place in the City Tech Academic Building at 285 Jay Street in downtown Brooklyn, New York on Tuesday, December 2, 2025 from 9:00am to 5:00pm in Room A-105.

The event is free and open to the public. Pre-registration for this in-person event is not required. Participants and attendees who are not affiliated with the college will need to sign-in at the security desk before entering. Room A-105 is down the hallway to the right of the turnstiles on the right side (street-facing side of the building).

Program

9:00AM Opening Remarks

Jason Ellis and Justin F. Vázquez-Poritz

9:15AM Break

9:20AM Paper Session 1

Moderator: Kel Karpinski

Jason Ellis, “10 Year Retrospective”

Mary Billyou, “Pocket Paperback & Pulp Magazine Covers of Important LGBTQIA+ Texts in the City Tech Science Fiction Collection”

Frank Wu, “Images of Aliens and Strange Creatures in Astounding and Analog Science Fiction and Fact“

10:40AM Break

10:50AM Paper Session 2

Moderator: Wanett Clyde

Jason Ellis, “City Tech SF Collection”

Jim Keen, “Hallucinated Cities: Designing Cognitive Environments Through Image and Imagination”

Richard Rivera, “Cli-Fi and Community Alliance and Reporting Environmental Systems (CARES)”

12:10PM Lunch

1:10PM Student Panel: “‘Never did I behold a vision so horrible’: Frankenstein Reimagined”

Moderator: Vivian Zuluaga Papp

Gal Ben Baruch, Dante Florian, Jonathan Kayumov, 

Gilberto Martinez, Michael Peterkin Jr., Matthew Ramirez, Yudesh Ramphal, Chandler Wu, Kaiwei Yu, and Elijah Zindoga

2:00PM Break

2:10PM Analog/Asimov’s Artists and Writers Panel

Moderator: Emily Hockaday

Donato Giancola

Aleksandra (Ola) Hill

Kris Dikeman

Frank Wu

3:50PM Break

4:00PM Keynote Address: “Is Contemporary Science Fiction Strange Enough?”

Moderator: Leigh Gold

Keynote Speaker: Carlos Hernandez

Participants

Savonne Andrews designed this year’s event poster. He is a graphic designer specializing in branding and visual storytelling. He believes that thoughtful creative decisions develop lasting memories in our mind without us realizing. His mission is to craft interactive art experiences that inspire large audiences through his experience in animation and writing. Connect with him on linkedin.com/in/savonneandrews and savonnea.myportfolio.com.

Jill Belli is Associate Professor of English at New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where she happily teaches science fiction and utopian studies often. She’s working on long-standing projects on well-being & happiness in education and writing & revising in speculative fiction. Newer interests include nature writing, healing & illness, tarot & astrology as storytelling / intuitive literacy, and grief. Learn more about Jill and her interdisciplinary research and teaching: jillbelli.org.

Gal Ben Baruch is a BTech in Emerging Media Technology student at City Tech.

Mary Billyou is a writer and lens-based artist who examines the archive, social practice, and the resonances of landscapes. She is currently attaining a dual degree in Information Studies and History at CUNY Queens College and is working as an archival research assistant on the City Tech Science Fiction Collection.

Wanett Clyde is the Collections Management Librarian at CUNY’s New York City College of Technology, where in addition to managing the library’s collection she oversees the university archives. Her research seeks to explore the intersection of Black history and fashion history, drawing out under credited African-American contributors, their critical innovations and accomplishments, and other meaningful connections in the overlapping research spheres.

Kris Dikeman lives and works in New York City. Her stories have appeared in Sybil’s Garage, All Hallows, Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, Strange Horizons, and Year’s Best Fantasy 9. She is currently at work on a novel about life, love, and zombie hordes in Manhattan. You can read more of her work at her website: www.krisdikeman.com.

Jason W. Ellis is an Associate Professor of English at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY, where he coordinates the City Tech Science Fiction Collection. He published the OER Yet Another Science Fiction Textbook, and co-edited The Postnational Fantasy: Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics and Science Fiction (McFarland, 2011) and a special issue on Star Wars: The Force Awakens of New American Notes Online, and talked with Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson about the relationship between SF and society on StarTalk Radio.

Dante Florian is an AAS in Computer Engineering Technology student at City Tech.

Donato Giancola is a freelance artist whose oil paintings over a 33 year career have graced the covers of over three hundred novels, appeared in scores of exhibitions, and landed him numerous peer honors notably including three Hugo Awards, and twenty-three Chesley Awards, and the prestigious Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators. Formative years in the early nineties were spent as the studio assistant to the preeminent figure painter Vincent Desiderio, and long days of study in the museums of New York. 

Donato recognizes the significant cultural role played by visual art and makes personal efforts to contribute to the expansion and appreciation of the narrative genre that extend beyond the commissions of his clients.  To those ends he taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City for twenty-five years and now mentors artists online and appears at various institutions, universities, workshops, and events worldwide where he performs demonstrations, exhibits work, and lectures on his aesthetics.

Donato is currently engaged on multiple fronts with his genre themed works for exhibition, book projects for J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth, ongoing commercial book assignments, and explorations on his developing themes of Empathetic Robots and astronauts.

Donato lives and works with his wife in Brooklyn, New York.

Leigh Gold (she/her) is a Doctoral Lecturer in the English Department at City Tech. She teaches composition, fiction, poetry, women’s studies, and American literature. Her doctoral work explored mourning in the work of Else Lasker-Schüler using several theoretical approaches, among them feminist, trauma, and poetic theories.  Since then, she has deepened her focus on interdisciplinary work such as writing about Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Judith Merril, Eastern philosophies and ethics, trauma and healing in women’s science fiction, and the role of the body in poetry. Leigh contributed an essay to the 2025 anthology Jewish Women Writers Create Science Fiction: Gender, Temporality–and Yentas, edited by Marleen S Barr. She also writes fiction and poetry and is developing new courses on journal writing and dreams in literature. She is thrilled to be a part of this wonderful Symposium and grateful to have been a part of all of the Symposia over the past ten years!

Carlos Hernandez is the New York Times best-selling author who wrote the critically acclaimed short story collection The Assimilated Cuban’s Guide to Quantum Santeria (Rosarium, 2016), the novel Sal and Gabi Break the Universe (Disney Hyperion, 2019), which won the 2020 Pura Belpré Award, and its sequel, Sal and Gabi Fix the Universe. He’s also written dozens of short stories, poems, and works of drama, usually in the SFF mode. Recently, Carlos has written several comics for Marvel, including the characters America Chavez, Spider-man, Spider Punk, and Miles Morales.

Carlos earned his Ph. D. in English, with an emphasis in Creative Writing, from Binghamton University in 2000. He is Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), where he teaches Composition, Creative Writing, Science Fiction, and other courses at BMCC, and, at the CUNY Graduate Center, teaches in the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Program, where his academic interests have centered around game-based learning in postsecondary environments. 

That work in particular has led Carlos to work extensively in game writing and game design. He has served as lead writer and a game designer on the CRPG Meriwether, as a writer and designer for the installation art of Mary Miss, and as literary curator on the Apple Arcade game Dear Reader, among other video games. As a co-founder of the CUNY Games Network and of the Board Game Designers Group of New York, he’s contributed to the development of many board and card games, both educational and commercial. With his wife, author C. S. E. Cooney, he released in 2025 GM-less roleplaying game Negocios Infernales, published by Outland Entertainment. 

Aleksandra (Ola) Hill is a Polish-Canadian writer and the founder and editor-in-chief of khōréō, a quarterly magazine of speculative fiction by immigrant and diaspora writers. Her stories have appeared in Analog, Writer’s Digest, Uncharted Magazine, and others. In a past life, she was a computational biologist fascinated by machine learning. You can find her slinking around NYC bookstores and online at www.aleksandrahill.com.

Emily Hockaday is the senior managing editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine. She coedited the horror anthology Terror at the Crossroads with Jackie Sherbow and is the editor of the speculative poetry anthology Heartbeat of the Universe. Hockaday is the author of Naming the Ghost, Blood Music, and In a Body. She has received grants from the De Groot Foundation, Café Royal Cultural Foundation, NYFA City Artist Corps, and Queens Council on the Arts. You can find her at www.emilyhockaday.com.

Kel R. Karpinski (they/he) is the IT/ILL Librarian and Associate Professor at the New York City College of Technology, CUNY. Their research focuses on mid-century queer films and novels as they relate to sailors and hustlers in Times Square and how these texts map queer desire onto the city. Kel is also a zine maker and a NY Queer Zine Fair organizer.

Jonathan Kayumov is an AAS in Computer Information Systems student at City Tech.

Jim Keen is an architect, illustrator, and speculative fiction author exploring how visual design and spatial systems shape narrative and cognition. With over 25 years of experience leading civic and cultural architecture projects across North America, Europe, and Asia, he brings a unique design sensibility to speculative worldbuilding. His hand-drawn architectural illustrations have been featured by Apple, and his Alice Yu series—set in a fractured 2055 New York—treats the city as a cognitive system that drives behavior, memory, and story. Keen’s creative process blends sketching, 3D modeling, and generative AI to develop environments that don’t just reflect fictional realities but shape them. His current research investigates how images and designed spaces act as recursive tools for exploring trauma, control, and emergent narrative logic in science fiction.

Lucas Kwong is a writer, musician, and associate professor of English at New York City College of Technology. He’s written at eschatontwist.substack.com, Institute for Christian Socialism’s Bias Magazine, Public Books, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Victorian Literature and Culture. His podcast series, Monster In The Mirror, is a spinoff of Straight White American Jesus. His music can be found at brotherkmusic.com.

Gilberto Martinez is a BTech in Computer Engineering Technology student at City Tech.

Vivian Zuluaga Papp is a Doctoral Lecturer in the English Department here at City Tech. She has a BA in English from Columbia University, an MA in British and American Literature from Hunter College, and her Ph.D. is in Eighteenth-Century British Literature from Fordham University. Previously, she taught classes in Satire, Women in Science Fiction, Afrofuturism, and Imaginary Travel Narratives while a Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow at Fordham University.  She has also taught a course on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man for the Rosenbach Museum in Philadelphia, Pa. Her research interest is in the field of visual epistemology in seventeenth-century scientific texts and early forms of the novel. She is the author of a short science fiction story “Catbot’s in the Cradle,” which was published in Behind the Yellow Wallpaper: New Tales of Madness, and has a chapter entitled “Picturing Air: The Rhetoric of Nondescription in Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico- Mechanicall and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” included in Histories of Science: Natural Philosophy in the Eighteenth-Century World (UVA Press) available now.

Michael Peterkin, Jr. is a BFA in Communication Design student at City Tech.

Matthew Ramirez is an AAS in Communication Design student at City Tech.

Yudesh Ramphal is an AAS in Environmental Control Technology student at City Tech.

Richard Rivera is a PhD Student in the CUNY Graduate Center’s Environmental and Geological Sciences program. He is dedicated to building community resilience against climate threats. With a background that includes service in the U.S. Navy as a rescue swimmer and engineer, bringing a multi-disciplined, mission-oriented approach to safeguarding vulnerable populations in NYC. His work now focuses on hydro-magnetic, environmental justice and citizen science, with particular attention to highly vulnerable areas like East Harlem. He aims to empower residents with tools like NOAA’s mPING app (and flood tools that are being developed) to bridge the gap between hyperlocal experience and national forecasting. His mission is to translate complex climate data into actionable strategies, ensuring communities are prepared, informed, and resilient in the face of an ever changing planet.

Justin F. Vázquez-Poritz is the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at New York College of Technology, CUNY.

Chandler Wu is a BTech in Mechanical Engineering Technology student at City Tech.

Frank Wu is a science fiction author and artist living near Boston, Massachusetts. His art has won four Hugo Awards, and his stories have appeared in Analog magazine eight times. Most recently, his novella co-written with Jay Werkheiser, “Under the Moons of Venus: A Tale of a Princess Altivolant”, an Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired frolicsome sword-and-planet adventure, appeared in the July-August 2025 issue of Analog.

Kaiwei Yu is a BTech in Computer Engineering Technology student at City Tech.

Elijah Zindoga is a BTech in Mechanical Engineering Technology student at City Tech.

Symposium Co-Organizers

This year’s symposium was co-organized by Jill Belli, Wanett Clyde, Jason W. Ellis, Leigh Gold, Kel Karpinski, Lucas Kwong, and Vivian Zuluaga Papp.

Special Thanks

We would like to thank Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction for providing magazine issues to give to attendees, and a special thank you to Emily Hockaday for organizing the artists and writers panel.

Science Fiction Collection

The New York City College of Technology, CUNY (City Tech) holds an extensive collection of genre literature and scholarship focusing primarily on Science Fiction, and secondarily on Mystery and Horror. Inaugurated in 2016 as the City Tech Science Fiction Collection, it contains over 600 linear feet of magazines, anthologies, novels, monographs, and scholarly journals. Thanks to its founding anonymous donor, it features near-complete runs of the major SF magazines. The collection has continued to grow thanks to donations from David Mead, Aaron Barlow, and Charlie Seelig.

The City Tech Science Fiction Collection is held in the Archives and Special Collections of the Ursula C. Schwerin Library. In addition to the collection serving as a locus for an annual symposium on Science Fiction and supplementing student research in City Tech’s ENG2420 Science Fiction course, it is a public collection, so scholars are invited to visit and make use of the collection’s holdings in their research.

Notably, the collection includes a library of texts that contains more than 4,000 science fiction magazine issues from complete or near-complete titles, including Amazing Stories, Astounding/Analog, Fantastic, Future, Galaxy, Galileo, If, Imagination, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Omni, Spaceway, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Vertex, and Worlds of Tomorrow. An inventory is available at https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/sciencefictionatcitytech/librarycollection/.  

To inquire about the collection’s holdings or arrange a visit, contact Collections Management Librarian Wanett Clyde (wclyde@citytech.cuny.edu) and Jason Ellis (jellis@citytech.cuny.edu).

The annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium is held each year in celebration of the collection, which in turn provides the foundation for exploring different themes and issues through interdisciplinary conversations. We have been honored by symposia keynote addresses by Samuel R. Delany, Mike Flynn, Jonathan W. Gray, Ximena Gallardo C. and Ann Matsuuchi, Jeremy Brett, Ytasha L. Womack, Marleen S. Barr, and this year, Carlos Hernandez.