Celebrating the 30th Anniversary of the Publication of “Parable of the Sower”
Join us for a virtual celebration of the 30th anniversary of the publication of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower. Hosted by Isis Asare, the founder of Sistah Scifi – the first Black owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy in the United States. Panelists include adrienne maree brown, Ayana Jamieson, and Dan Simon. This program is online only and free to attend.
In October 1993, Four Walls Eight Windows published the first edition of Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. At the time, Butler was at the height of her literary career. The 1995 MacArthur Fellow already published the Patternist Series, Kindred – which would sell over 1M copies, and the Xenogensis Series with Doubleday & Company.
Parable of the Sower – the first first book in an unfinished series – would be followed by Parable of the Talents in 1998. Set in a dystopian California in 2024, Parable of the Sower tells the story of how 15-year-old Lauren Oya Olamina creates community and develops a philosophy centered on the belief that God Is Change.
Join us for an in-depth interactive panel discussion on the cultural impact of Parable of the Sower with our esteemed panelists followed by a question and answer session.
This program is presented in conjunction with the AWM’s special exhibit Dark Testament: A Century of Black Writers on Justice, in which Butler’s work is featured. Learn more about the exhibit here.
PANELISTS
adrienne maree brown: adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of several published texts, cogenerator of a tarot deck and a developing musical ritual.
Ayana Jamieson: Ayana Jamieson, PhD is an educator, mythologist, and depth psychologist. She is the founder of the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, a global community founded in 2011, committed to highlighting Octavia Butler’s life and work while creating new works inspired by Butler’s legacy. Ayana’s essay, “Far Beyond the Stars” appears in the Black Futures anthology, 51 Feminist Thinkers, Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction, and elsewhere. She is assistant professor of ethnic studies and African American studies at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.
Daniel Simon: Dan Simon is an American editor and independent publisher who also writes articles, books, and plays in various genres on a wide range of subjects at the juncture between the literary and the political. An early champion of the American writer of the dispossessed, Nelson Algren, Simon has kept Algren completely in print, co-edited several collections of unpublished writings, and co-wrote the playscript for the just-released film, Nelson Algren Live. At the independent publishing house he founded, Seven Stories Press, he has edited many important works of American literature, including Octavia Butler’s last three novels (Parable of Sower, Parable of the Talents, and Fledgling), Kurt Vonnegut’s last canonical book, A Man without a Country, and all of Barry Gifford’s fiction for the last twenty years. He published the National Book Award-winning Poems Seven by Alan Dugan, and Stanley Moss’s Almost Complete Poems, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, and many other award-winning and best-selling works of fiction and nonfiction, including Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire and Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis.
MODERATOR
Isis Asare: Isis Asare is a queer Afrofuturist, serial technology entrepreneur, and lover of community, yoga, and all things Black culture. You can catch Isis zooming through cyberspace or in-person wherever Black folks gather. A citizen of the world, Isis was born to Ghanaian immigrants in Harlem. Isis concurrently resides in Seattle, WA and Oakland, CA with their supportive and evolving polycule.
Isis is an alum of Stanford University, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Columbia Business School were they earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, masters in public policy, and MBA respectively. Isis is the founder of Sistah Scifi – the first Black owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy in the United States as validated by the American Booksellers Association. Isis is currently the CEO/Founder of Sistah Scifi. The first Black-owned bookstore focused on science fiction and fantasy.