Join experts on Afrospeculation to discuss how the legacy of Octavia E. Butler allows us to reimagine new futures and view the past anew. In honor of Black History Month

Lunch and refreshments will be served. Masks are highly recommended and will be provided at the event.

Walidah Imarisha is an educator and a writer. She is the co-editor of two anthologies, Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements and Another World is Possible. Imarisha is the author of Angels with Dirty Faces: Three Stories of Crime, Prison and Redemption, which won an Oregon Book Award, as well as the poetry collection Scars/Stars. She has received a Tiptree Fellowship for her science fiction writing. She is the writer and co-producer of Space to Breathe (2024), a documentary/science fiction hybrid film set in an abolitionist future. Imarisha currently teaches in Portland State University’s Black Studies Department and is the Director of the PSU’s Center for Black Studies. In the past, she has taught at Stanford University, Oregon State University, and Pacific Northwest College of the Arts.

John Jennings is a professor, author, graphic novelist, curator, Harvard Fellow, New York Times Bestseller, 2018 Eisner Winner, and winner of the Hugo Award for his co-adaptation of Octavia E. Butler’s dystopian novel The Parable of the Sower. As Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside (UCR), Jennings examines the visual culture of race in various media forms including film, illustrated fiction, and comics and graphic novels. He is also the director of Abrams ComicArts imprint Megascope, which publishes graphic novels focused on the experiences of people of color. Jennings is co-editor of the 2016 Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art (Rutgers) and co-founder/organizer of The Schomburg Center’s Black Comic Book Festival in Harlem. Jennings also created Marvel’s new AfroCaribbean cosmic superhero Ghost Light with artist Valentine Delandro. 

Dr. Stephanie Jones is Assistant Professor of English in Digital Rhetoric at the University of Oregon. Her PhD is from Syracuse University in Composition and Cultural Rhetoric and Women and Gender Studies. She was awarded the 2021 Geneva Smitherman Award for Research in Black Language, Literacies, Cultures, and Rhetorics from NCTE/CCCC Black Caucus, the 2023 Rhetoric Society of America Dissertation Award, and the 2023 NWSA/Routledge Book Series Prize on “Subversive Histories, Feminist Futures.” Her research explores Afrofuturist Feminisms, Black Feminist Rhetorical Studies, Black Digital Rhetorics, and Video Game Studies. She was born and raised in Southern California.