Amazon Studios and JuVee Productions (Viola Davis and Julius Tennon’s production company) are developing a drama series from Butler’s PATTERNIST series, beginning with WILD SEED, and the series is being co-written by Nnedi Okorafor and Wanuri Kahiu, who will also direct. An opera by Toshi Reagon based on Butler’s novel PARABLE OF THE SOWER was part of The Public Theatre “Under the Radar” festival and toured worldwide in 2018. In media, her novel DAWN is being developed for television by Ava DuVernay (“Selma” “A Wrinkle In Time”). The #1 New York Times bestselling graphic novel adaptation of her book KINDRED, created by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, received the Eisner Award for best adaptation. Her work is now taught in over 200 colleges and universities nationwide. Butlers ability to blur the genres of science fiction, historical fiction, and slave narrative. At the time of her death, interest in her books was beginning to rise, and in recent years, sales of her books have increased enormously as the issues she addressed in her Afro-Futuristic, feminist novels and short fiction have only become more relevant. every day to write, and then went to work as a telemarketer, potato chip inspector, and dishwasher, among other things. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.Though the MacArthur Grant made life easier in later years, she struggled for decades when her dystopian novels exploring themes of Black injustice, global warming, women’s rights and political disparity were, to say the least, not in commercial demand.ĭuring these years of obscurity Butler, always an early riser, woke at 2 a.m. Butler died of a stroke at the age of 58. She also taught writer's workshops, and eventually relocated to Washington state. Her books and short stories drew the favorable attention of the public and awards judges. She soon sold her first stories and by the late 1970s had become sufficiently successful as an author that she was able to pursue writing full-time. She attended community college during the Black Power movement, and while participating in a local writer's workshop was encouraged to attend the Clarion Workshop, which focused on science fiction. She began writing science fiction as a teenager. Extremely shy as a child, Octavia found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. In 1995, she became the first science fiction writer to receive the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant.Īfter her father died, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Octavia Estelle Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the best-known among the few African-American women in the field. During numerous such time-defying episodes with the same young man, she realizes the challenge she’s been given. After saving a drowning white boy there, she finds herself staring into the barrel of a shotgun and is transported back to the present just in time to save her life. Having just celebrated her 26th birthday in 1976 California, Dana, an African-American woman, is suddenly and inexplicably wrenched through time into antebellum Maryland. This combination of slave memoir, fantasy, and historical fiction is a novel of rich literary complexity. History: Queer Kinship and Cruel Optimism in Octavia Butlers Kindred. The first science fiction written by a black woman, Kindred has become a cornerstone of black American literature. science fiction, feminism, African American voices, and Octavia E.
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