Bay Area Book Festival: Black Feminist Futurescaping

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“The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (Audre Lorde), but the tools that have been used for dismantling in the past might just be the ones we use to build the future. For Octavia Butler, science fiction stories were her tools for speculating the devolution of the American empire and simultaneously offered cautionary tales about our propensity for violence and sanguine manifestations that alter our current paradigms and envision Black women at the center of the world. In her cultural biography, , Black feminist Afrofuturist writer, scholar, and cultural critic places Butler’s story within the historical and social contexts that influenced the ideas central to her celebrated writing. Similarly, in , researcher asks us to look beyond the surface of another iconic writer and symbol of Black feminism. Audre Lorde is well-known for her quotable essays, but Gumbs’ groundbreaking research into the full depths of Lorde’s manuscript archives reveal her deep engagement with the planetary dynamics of geology, meteorology, and biology. In a society that rejected her Black feminist lesbian warrior poet existence, these ecological images provided the literal guides for self-defense, for survival, and for writing the future. Moderated by of Sistah Scifi, the first Black-owned bookstore in the nation dedicated to science fiction, this panel will examine the environments that influenced the two visionary Black feminist writers and the wisdom their works provide for dismantling unjust realities as we create our own futures.
Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland
About Bay Area Book Festival
Bay Area Book Festival is a world-class literary extravaganza taking place each year over two days in Downtown Berkeley. All their programming, 250-300 authors on 15 stages, is accessible and mostly totally free. Over the years, they’ve showcased more than 1,500 speakers who come from the Bay Area, the state of California, the nation, and the world; Since their founding, they’ve thrilled more than 125,000 book-lovers of all ages. Read more here.
About Susana Morris

Susana Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and was most recently the Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature, co-editor, with Brittney C. Cooper and Robin M. Boylorn, of The Crunk Feminist Collection, and co-author, with Brittney C. Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, of the young adult handbook:Feminist AF The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. She is the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective and has written for Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com and Ebony.com, and has also been featured on NPR and the BBC, and in Essence and the New York Times.
About Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Alexis Pauline Gumbs is the author of several works of poetry and of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Animals, which won a Whiting Writers’ Award in 2022. In 2023, she won a Windham Campbell Prize for her poetry. She lives in Durham, North Carolina.
About Isis Asare

Isis Asare is the visionary 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. With a background spanning business, technology, and community engagement, she attended Stanford University majoring in Psychology and minoring in African and African-American Studies and holds a MBA and Master's in Public Policy from Columbia Business School and Harvard University respectively.
About selena feliciano (Bushwick Book Club Oakland)

is a hopeful-eco-sad-girl in the Bay Area. Her songs are a mixture of folk and soul, rooted in memory, resistance, and the Earth we’ve nearly forgotten how to listen to. Through sound, story, and community, she offers a reminder: we are not alone in our healing. We can return to each other, and we can return to ourselves. Listen to her debut EP FROM EVERY DIRECTION on all streaming platforms, on instagram.

Bushwick Book Club Oakland (BBCO) is a community event series co-produced by Claire Calderón, Nikki Bonsol, and Mia Pixley where Bay Area musicians from a wide range of genres compose and debut brand new original songs inspired by books.

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