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Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, Bloodchild, and More

Literary Arts 925 SW Washington Street, Portland, OR, United States

With the growing interesting in science fiction, several writers have worked to deconstruct popular tropes to examine contemporary social issues. Octavia Butler’s final work, Fledgling, is a science fiction novel that repositions the idea of the vampire to discuss issues of race, gender, agency, and empowerment by exploring the journey of Shori, an amnesiac vampire child that attempts to unravel that mystery of her creation and the events that lead to the loss of her memory. Similar themes are discussed in Butler’s Hugo and Nebula award-winning short story, “Bloodchild”, that tells the story of a Gan, a human boy living on another planet where he comes to understand the the relationship between himself and the T’Gatoi, the insectoid race of the planet. Reading List: Fledgling by…

Continue readingOctavia Butler’s Fledgling, Bloodchild, and More
$150

Well-Read Black Girl Book Club

Powell's City of Books 1005 W Burnside Street, Portland, OR, United States

Black women and Black nonbinary people are invited to join us every second Thursday of the month for the Well-Read Black Girl Book Club. This month we’re reading Kindred by Octavia E. Butler.

Free

Delve Readers Seminar: Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

“The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.” Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower   “You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed   When the unimaginable is occurring, how do we navigate the chaos? When violence is rampant and further disasters loom, where might we find guidance? Perhaps to books that have imagined the potential dystopias that we now seem to be approaching, books like The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin and Parable of…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler
$240

Delve Readers Seminar: Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Many of us have described the past year as “apocalyptic” or “dystopian.” We’ve been living through a global pandemic, a critical presidential election, ravaging wildfires, and a national reckoning with our country’s legacy of racism and police violence. Utopic and dystopic fiction can help us make sense of our experience and ask questions about our future. In this seminar we’ll read three works of utopic and dystopic fiction written by women authors. In our reading and discussion of each text, we will focus on a few core questions: Who are we, as a society? Who do we want to be? What gets in the way of becoming the society we dream of? What do fictional dystopias and utopias teach us about what we fear and…

Continue readingDelve Readers Seminar: Imagining the Future: Dystopic and Utopic Fiction
$240

Daylight Book Club

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Thursday, September 2, 2021 at 11:00 AM the Ledding Library Daylight Book Club will meet via Zoom to discuss Parable of the Sower, by Octavia E. Butler. For more information contact Reference Librarian Laura Francillon at francillonl@milwaukieoreogn.gov (link sends e-mail).

Free

A CONVERSATION WITH JOHN JENNINGS AND DAMIAN DUFFY

Online N/A, Portland, OR, United States

Join Comics Studies and the Portland Center for the Humanities at PSU for a conversation with John Jennings and Damian Duffy, co-collaborators on Black Comix Returns and the graphic novelization of Octavia Butler's prescient dystopian novel Parable of the Sower. John Jennings is a Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the University of California at Riverside. Jennings is co-editor of the Eisner Award-winning collection The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of the Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art. Jennings is also a 2016 Nasir Jones Hip Hop Studies Fellow with the Hutchins Center at Harvard University. Jennings' current projects include the horror anthology Box of Bones, the coffee table book Black Comix Returns (with Damian Duffy), and the Eisner-winning, Bram Stoker Award-winning, New York…

Continue readingA CONVERSATION WITH JOHN JENNINGS AND DAMIAN DUFFY
Free
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