For questions about the shared read or suggestions for programming, please contact the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at saicdiversity@saic.edu.
When planning the anthology the editors, Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown, envisioned not only the book, but a series of events, organizing sessions, writing workshops, and talks to further the vision of a more equitable future “by turning ideas and dreams into action."1
Walidah Imarisha is a writer, educator, and spoken word artist. She is the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption (nonfiction), the poetry collection Scars/Stars, and co-edited two anthologies, Octavia's Brood and Another World is Possible. She is the Director of the Center for Black Studies and Assistant Professor, both at Portland State University2 and she also facilitates writing workshops at schools, community centers, youth detention facilities, and women's prisons.3
adrienne maree brown
adrienne maree brown is a writer, speaker, and activist. She is the author of nonfiction Emergent Strategy, We Will Not Cancel Us, Pleasure Activism, and science fiction, Maroons, as well as co-editing Octavia's Brood. Her study of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin has greatly influenced her life’s work, not only the writings, but also the creation of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, a series of Octavia Butler–based writing workshops, and number speaking engagements.4
Octavia’s Authors
Brief biographies of the authors by the Shoreline Community College Library.
The following biographies are copied from pages 287-296 in Octavia's Brood, 2015 (published by AK Press and the Institute for Anarchist Studies) with minor updates for web accessibility.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker, a black feminist love evangelist, an Afro-Caribbean grandchild, a prayer-poet priestess, and a time-traveling space cadet who lives and loves in Durham, North Carolina. Alexis is the founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind local and intergalactic community school and a cofounder of the Mobile Homecoming Project, an experiential archive amplifying generations of queer black brilliance. Alexis was the first scholar to research the Audre Lorde papers at Spelman College, the June Jordan papers at Harvard University, and the Lucille Clifton papers at Emory University while earning her PhD in English, African and African American Studies, and Women and Gender Studies from Duke University. And her mother is a Trekkie.
Author's website
Alixa Garcia is cofounder and artistic director of Climbing Poe Tree, an internationally renowned activist, multimedia theater, and spoken-word duo out of Brooklyn, New York. She has facilitated workshops and performed in hundreds of venues, from Harvard University to New York City jails on Rikers Island. Garcia has presented alongside such powerhouses as Angela Davis, Alicia Keys, and Alice Walker. Her work has appeared in dozens of literary journals and magazines, including ArtForum and ColorLines. Her visual art has been featured on large-scale walls in New York City, Cuba, and Jamaica, as well as in galleries and museums, including the Smithsonian, and the African American Museum in Philadelphia. She was the recipient of the Global Arts Fund/ Astrea Visual Artist Grant, 2013-14, and won the best director award at the Reel Sistah Film Festival, New York City, 2008, for Unnatural Disasters and a Great Shift in Universal Consciousness. Through multiple artistic media, this multidisciplinary artist is on a mission to overcome destruction with creativity.
Author's website
Autumn Brown is a mother, community organizer, theologian, artist, and facilitator. She is the Interim Executive Director of RECLAIM! and serves on the board of directors of the Common Fire Foundation. She has facilitated organizational and strategic development with community-based and movement organizations and trained hundreds of community organizers in consensus process, facilitation, and resisting racism. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College, she has also completed specialized study in theology at Oxford University and the General Theological Seminary of New York. She is a recipient of the 2009 Next Generation of Leadership Fellowship through the Center for Whole Communities and the 2010 Creative Community Leadership Institute Fellowship through Intermedia Arts. She currently lives in Avon, Minnesota, with her partner, children, dog, and wildlife.
Author's website
Bao Phi has been a performance poet since 1991. A two-time Minnesota Grand Slam champion and a National Poetry Slam finalist, Bao Phi has appeared on HBO's Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry, and a poem of his appeared in the 2006 Best American Poetry anthology. His first collection of poems, Sông I Sing, was published by Coffee House Press in 2011 to critical acclaim. He has been a City Pages and Star Tribune artist of the year.
Author's website
Dawolu Jabari Anderson lives and works in Houston. He studied fine arts at Texas Southern University and the University of Houston and completed residencies at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, and Skowhegan School of Paint and Sculpture in Skowhegan, Maine. Selected solo exhibitions include Dawolu Jabari Anderson: Black Film Glassell School of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and The Birth of a Nation-Yo! Bum rush the Show: Works by Dawolu Jabari Anderson, Arts League Houston. Selected group exhibitions include the Whitney Biennial 2006: Day for Night at the Whitney Museum of America Art, New York; System Error: Work is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, (2007), Palazzo delle Papesse, Siena, Italy; and Who Goliards? Artists at the Turn of the Century, (2004), University Museum, Texas Southern University.
Author's information
Dani McClain is a journalist living in Oakland, California. Her reporting and writing have been published in The Nation, Colorlines, Guernica, and Al Jazeera America.
Author's website
David F. Walker is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, educator, comic book writer, and author. His publication BadAzz MoFo became internationally known as the indispensable resource guide to black films of the seventies, and he is coauthor of the book Reflections on Blaxploitation: Actors and Directors Speak (Scarecrow, 2009). His other work includes the young adult series The Adventures of Darius Logan, as well as comic book series Number 13 (Dark Horse Comics) and The Army of Dr. Moreau (Monkeybrain Comics).
Author's website
To know that another world is possible and to bring it to life through music: this has always been the mission of emcee Gabriel Teodros. He first made a mark in the Pacific Northwest with the group Abyssinian Creole and reached an international audience with his critically acclaimed solo debut Lovework. He has since set stages on fire across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as in Ethiopia. The year 2012 saw two more acclaimed albums: the solo release Colored People's Time Machine and Copper Wires Earthbound, a hip-hop space opera set in the year 2089 char Teodros recorded with fellow Ethiopian-American artists Meklit Hadero and Burnt Face. In 2014 Teodros released Children of the Dragon with Washington DC- based producer AirMe, followed by Evidence of Things Not Seen with New Zealand-based producer SoulChef.
Author's website
New Orleans-based writer, filmmaker, and educator Kalamu ya Salaam is a senior staff member of Students at the Center, a writing program in the New Orleans public schools. Kalamu is the moderator of neo•griot, an information blog for black writers and supporters of our literature worldwide. Kalamu can be reached at kalamu@mac.com.
Author's website
Jelani Wilson lives and writes in Jersey with his kickass family If he's not voraciously reading, watching cartoons, or practicing rapper hands, he's off somewhere training in jiu jitsu or subverting authority He promises to scan posting his fiction along with mercifully brief musings and sociopolitical commentary at pageswithoutpaper.com, but on the real we'll believe it when we see it.
Author's information
Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer mixed Sri Lankan writer, performer, educator, and healer. The author of the Lambda Award-winning Love Cake and Consensual Genocide, she is also the coeditor, with ChingIn Chen andJai Dulani, of The Revolution Starts at Home: Confronting Intimate Violence in Activist Communities. She is the co founder of Mangos With Chili, and a lead artist with Sins Invalid. She has organized around issues of transformative justice, disability justice, and radical teaching and learning for twenty years. Her next book of poetry, Bodymap, and memoir, Dirty River, are forthcoming.
Author's website
LeVar Burton is an actor, presenter, director, producer, and author. He published his science fiction book Aftermath (Aspect Press) in 1997. Burton is best known for his roles as Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries Roots and as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: the Next Generation. He was the host and executive producer of the long-running PBS children's series Reading Rainbow, which ran for twenty-three years, garnering over two hundred broadcast awards, including a Peabody Award and twenty-six Emmy Awards. Burton and his company RRKIDZ re-imagined Reading Rainbow as an iPad app in 2012, which became the number one educational app within thirty-six hours of its debut. In 2014, Burton ran a successful Kickstarter campaign to bring Reading Rainbow back as a Web-based show with free access available for schools in need.
Author's website
Mia Mingus is a community organizer, writer, and educator working for disability justice and prison abolition via transformative justice and community accountability. She identifies as a queer physically disabled Korean woman transracial and transnational adoptee. She works for community, interdependency, and a home for all of us, not just some of us, and longs for a world where disabled children can live free of violence, with dignity and love. As her work for liberation evolves and deepens, her roots remain firmly planted in ending sexual violence. She works locally to build and support responses to child sexual abuse that do not rely on the state (i.e., police, prisons, the criminal legal system) with the Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective. Her writings can be found on her website. This is her first foray into writing fiction.
Author's website
Morrigan Phillips is an organizer, writer, Huffiepuff, and social worker living in Boston. Over the years, she has been a campaign and direct action organizer to thwart the forces of globalization. She currently works in the HIV/AIDS community in Boston, building networks of peer support and community-based programs to combat rising rates of infection. As a part of the Beautiful Trouble trainers network, Morrigan gets out and about doing direct action training. She is particularly enamored with creating and facilitating trainings that merge the power of imagined worlds with time-honored direct action training tools to find new and exacting avenues for radical change in the realms of climate justice, health access, public transportation, and more.
Author's website
Mumia Abu-Jamal is an award-winning journalist who chronicles the human condition. He was a resident of Pennsylvania's death row for twenty-nine years and is currently incarcerated at SCI Mahoney. Written from his solitary confinement cell, his essays have reached a worldwide audience. His books Live from Death Row, Death Blossoms: Reflections From a Prisoner of Conscience, All Things Censored, Faith of Our Fathers: An Examination of the Spiritual Life of African and African-American People, We 'Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party, Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A, and The Classroom and the Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America (with scholar Marc Lamont Hill) have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and been translated into nine languages. Mumia Abu-Jamal was in his youth a Trekkie and has read and loved sci-fi from Asimov to Herbert and Butler to Bisson. Forthcoming: Writing on the 'Wall: Selected Prison Writings of Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Author's information
Sheree Renee Thomas writes in Tennessee between a river and a pyramid. She is the author of Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems (Aqueduct Press) and editor of Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, winners of the 2001 and 2005 World Fantasy Awards, respectively. A Clarion West '99 grad, Sheree has served as a juror of the Speculative Fiction Foundation, the Carl Brandon Society, and the Tiptree Awards. Her own writing received honorable mention in the Year's Best Fantasy & Horror (16th and 17th eds.) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and two Rhysling Awards. Read her work in Eleven, Eleven; Strange Horizons; Mythic Delirium; storySouth; Callaloo; Meridians; Obsidian; Harpur Palate; The Moment of Change: Feminist Speculative Poetry; 80! Memories & Reflections on Ursula K Le Guin; Mojo: Conjure Stories; Hurricane Blues; Bum Rush the Page; The Ringing Ear; Mythic 2; and So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Author's website
Tananarive Due is the former Cosby Chair in the Humanities at Spelman College. She reaches in the creative writing MFA program at Antioch University Los Angeles. The American Book Award winner and NMCP Image Award recipient is the author of twelve novels and a civil rights memoir. She recently received a Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arcs from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, and in 2008 she won the Carl Brandon Society Kindred Award. Due and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote and coproduced a short film, Danger Word, based on their novel Devil's Wake, which was nominated for best short narrative film at the Pan African Film Festival and BromeLens Film Festival. A leading voice in Black speculative fiction, Due's first short story collection, Ghost Summer and Other Stories, will be published in the summer of 2015 by Prime Books. She lives in Southern California with Steven Barnes and their son Jason.
Author's website
Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue and the libretto/chapbook THE GREATEST! A Tribute to Muhammad Ali. Tara earned her PhD in English and creative writing at SUNY Binghamton University. Her poems appear in Near Kin: A Collection of Words and Art Inspired by Octavia Estelle Butler and several other anthologies. Her writings have appeared in Black Scholar, Essence, Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, Callaloo, Xavier Review, Mosaic magazine, and Sounding Out!, a journal in sound studies.
Author's information
Terry Bisson is a science fiction writer who lives in Oakland. He has also written biographies of Nat Turner and Mumia Abu-Jamal. His latest novel, Any Day Now (Overlook Press, 2012) is an alternate history of 1968.
Author's website
Tunde Olaniran is a community-focused entertainer and educator specializing in the areas of gender, sexual equality, and sexual health and awareness. A long-time community activist and recording artist based in Flint, Michigan, he excels in merging arts programming and events with social issues-based learning workshops as a way to present new ideas and viewpoints to a diverse audience. He holds a master's degree in nonprofit administration from the University of Michigan-Flint and is the manager of outreach for Planned Parenthood Mid and South Michigan.
Author's website
Born in Brooklyn to a Jamaican father and Puerto Rican mother, Vagabond's interest in art led him to become an artist, writer, and filmmaker. He studied fine and commercial art at a specialized high school in New York City and went on to study film at the School of Visual Arts. He dropped out of school to work with Spike Lee on Do The Right Thing and has worked in the film industry since then. He's worked in the Puerto Rican independence movement since 1997 and has organized rallies, protests, and marches and created murals, pamphlets, and agitprop with the artist collective he helped found, the RICANSTRUCTION Netwerk. His work has been featured in Blu Magazine, AWOL, SALVO, Centro, Left Turn, and Liberator Magazine. His first feature film Machetero is about the ongoing struggle for Puerto Rican independence and has won awards in South Africa,Wales, England, Thailand, Ireland, and New York.
Author's information
