Virtual Can*Con
April 18, 2026
10AM - 8PM EST
Online
Virtual Can*Con is your spring destination for taking part in amazing content, connecting with the community, and meeting new people! Hosted on Zoom and Discord, this one-day event is a great way to get inspired while staying home in your pajamas. Our first spring Virtual Can*Con on April 20, 2024 was a huge success, and we’re looking forward to doing it again on April 18, 2026.
This year’s theme is “disruption”. Disruption is about exploring, dissecting, and upending systems, whether in writing, in publishing, or in society at large! We want to host discussions about disruption of craft, disruption of narrative, and disruption of expectations. We also hope to look at important explorations in recent works around revolution and resistance.
Featuring Special Guests
Suzan Palumbo
Suzan Palumbo is a Trinidadian - Canadian, dark speculative fiction writer and editor. Her writing has been nominated for the Nebula, Aurora, World Fantasy and Locus awards. She also cofounded the Ignyte Awards with L.D. Lewis and coedited the special Caribbean issue of Strange Horizons Magazine. In 2025 she won a Locus Award for her work with the Ignytes. Her debut dark fantasy/horror short story collection "Skin Thief: Stories" is out now from Neon Hemlock. Her novella "Countess", a nebula award finalist, was published by ECW Press in September 2024. Her work has been published in Room Magazine, Lightspeed Magazine, Fantasy, The Deadlands, The Dark Magazine, PseudoPod, Fireside Fiction Quarterly, PodCastle, Anathema: Spec Fic from the Margins and other venues. She is officially represented by Michael Curry of the Donald Maass Literary Agency and can be found on instagram @gothicsyntax. When she isn’t writing, she is often listening to new wave, talking about vampires or wandering her local misty forests.
Natalie Zina Walschots
Natalie Zina Walschots is a writer and game designer. She is the Author of Hench , a novel about the mistreated and undervalued employees of supervillains. The direct sequel, Villian, will be released in May 2026. Hench was a finalist on the 2021 season of Canada Reads and was nominated for a Locus Award for Best First Novel. Natalie is the Narrative Director at Double Rex Studios, currently at work on a demo for their debut title, Thumbsplitter. Her work also includes LARP scripts, heavy metal music journalism, video game lore, and weirder things classified as "interactive experiences." Her poetic exploration of the notes engine in Bloodborne was featured in Kotaku and First Person Scholar, and her writing on the interactive adventure The Aluminum Cat won an IndieCade award for Innovation in Experience Design. She is (unfortunately) the author of two books of experimental poetry: Thumbscrews, which won the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and DOOM: Love Poems for Supervillains. Natalie plays a lot of TTRPGs, participates in a lot of Nordic LARPs, watches a lot of horror movies and reads a lot of speculative fiction. She lives in Nova Scotia with her partner and four morally bankrupt cats.
Schedule
Coming soon!
Panelists and Moderators
Coming soon!
