ASU Worldbuilding Initiative Student Showcase

April 23, 2024 | Piper Center and hybrid on Zoom

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites you to our 2025 Spring Student Showcase, to be held at the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing on April 23 from 5:00-6:15pm.

The ASU Worldbuilding Initiative is seeking submissions for our first Worldbuilding Student Showcase! This event will highlight the excellent work being done by ASU students in imaginative fields like science fiction and fantasy writing, as well as notable student futures thinking being done in other disciplines throughout our university. Selected students will present their chosen work at an in-person celebration to be held on the Tempe campus on April 23, 2024, at 5pm. (The showcase will also be livestreamed on Zoom.) 

Acceptable submissions include (but are not necessarily limited to):

• Fiction, including excerpts from novels or short stories 
• Creative nonfiction or academic essays
• Poetry
• Visual art
• Physical artifacts or artworks
• Video or audio works
• Performance pieces (music, spoken word, dance, etc)

Please note that each presentation will be limited to five minutes, if selected. When submitting from a longer work, please send only the excerpt you'd plan to share within that time limit. (Likely no more than 2-3 pages of double-spaced prose.) Please also note that no work created in whole or in part through the use of generative AI (including ChatGPT and other related tools) will be selected.

Deadline extended! Submissions are open now and will close at midnight on March 21, 2024. 

All submissions will be evaluated by the Worldbuilding Initiative team, and selected students will be notified by April 1. Please click here to submit via Google Forms (https://forms.gle/LXnKwtobmSi7nKZ36).

Hosted by the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics, the ASU Worldbuilding Initiative invites all members of our community—at ASU and beyond it—to come together in mutual inspiration, communal thinking, and imaginative play. Together, we endeavor to identify and engage students, faculty, and staff invested in imagining stronger communities, more egalitarian societies, truly sustainable economies, more just ways of inhabiting a planet under duress, and other ways of making better futures together.

Why do this? Because, as humans have long known—and as our myths and epics and other records of our wild imaginations demonstrate—that better futures that cannot be successfully imagined will not come to pass. The Worldbuilding Initiative is an attempt to increase the possibilities we have available to us by giving students and faculty a chance to participate in a narrative experience built around wonder, collaboration, curiosity, and problem-solving, putting into practice the modes of inquiry, thought, and imagination that will be essential to the envisioning of our future ways of life.

This event will be free and open to the public, in addition to the ASU community. It will be held on the Tempe campus and simultaneously livestreamed via Zoom.