True heroes would disrupt the status quo

To say that I was thrilled that Geek Girl Con ‘23 decided to accept all of Hinton’s panel and workshop proposals would be a great understatement. GGC has long been my favorite con, filling a vital need for a nerd space that puts girls’ needs at the center and boldly going against gatekeeping. Being a part of such a celebration—and helping to bring about feminist geek culture—was a dream come true.

Our first event at GGC ‘23 was a panel called “Killmonger was Right.” Our publisher, Marcus Harrison Green, moderated a conversation between two of our upcoming authors: Reagan E. J. Jackson and Sean Goode. The panel was inspired by author Ted Chiang. When speaking about his distaste for super heroes narratives Chiang said, “the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo.” The panel’s discussion was liberatory and engaging, and it left me marinating on what liberation could look like if we let ourselves imagine a little more freely. *

In an attempt to echo that conversation, and to perhaps start sparking our collective imagination, our final contribution to GGC ‘23 rogramming was the workshop that created this book. Called “Let’s make a book together!” the event promised to give each participant a prompt and then time to create something for a book. The prompt was in two parts: First, “What is the greatest problem facing the world today?” And second: “Create something for a book about a super hero or team that fights it.”

What you’ll find in these pages is a collection of visions of how to overcome great challenges, both real and fantastic, serious and hilarious. Through short stories, character/team designs, and illustrations, talented attendees of Geek Girl Con envisioned a world where the exceptional worked for everyone’s liberation. We know you will enjoy this compilation of their work and hope it might even inspire you to imagine how we might start to overcome what weighs us down.

*We also hosted a FANTASTIC panel of authors from under-invited communities, talking about why they started writing their own stories, featuring Reagan E. J. Jackson, Aiden Thomas,and Elsa Sjunneson, moderated

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