On Thursday, June 1st at 4pm PDT / 7pm EDT, join Massy Books online for Alchemizing Black Futures, a wide-ranging conversation between world-renowned science fiction authors N.K Jemisin, Nalo Hopkinson, and fellow award-winning author and multidisciplinary creator, adrienne maree brown, moderated by poet Brandon Wint. In Alchemizing Black Futures these profound writers will explore the ways that futurity, world building and radical imagination apply to their creative practices–and broader, social notions of justice. In this rare dialogue between three brilliant, genre-defying artists, we’ll bear witness to some of the ways their writing and creative practices constitute an alchemy—a deep attention to the realities of Black life in the present and the possibilities of Black life into the future.
About the Authors:
N.K Jemisin is the first author in the genre’s history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and she is a 2020 MacArthur Genius Grant Fellow. Her recent Great Cities duology is a New York Times bestseller. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She’s been an instructor for Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. Among other critical work, she was formerly the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer at the New York Times. In her spare time she’s a gamer and gardener, responsible for saving the world from KING Ozzymandias, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his destructive sidekick Magpie.
Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica, and spent the first 16 years of her life in Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and the US before her family moved to Canada. She writes science fiction and fantasy, exploring their potential for centering non-normative voices and experiences. Her first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest in 1998. She has published six novels and numerous short stories. Her writing has received the John W. Campbell Award, Locus Magazine’s Best First Novel Award, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, the World Fantasy Award, the Andre Norton (Nebula) Award, the Gaylactic Spectrum Award, the Inkpot Award, the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award, and Canada’s Prix/Aurora Award. From 2018 to 2020, she was the lead writer of “House of Whispers” (co-writer Dan Watters), a series of comics published by DC Comics and set in the universe of Neil Gaiman’s “Sandman.” She has received honorary Dr of Letters degrees from Anglia Ruskin University and the Ontario College of Art and Design University.
Hopkinson has been a Writer-in-Residence a number of times at the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshops in San Diego, California and Seattle, Washington. She was the editor of the fiction anthologies Mojo: Conjure Stories, and Whispers From the Cotton-Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. She was co-editor of So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction (with Uppinder Mehan), Particulates (with Rita McBride), Tesseracts 9 (with Geoff Ryman), and the fiction editor (with Kristine Ong Muslim) of “People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction,” a special issue of Lightspeed Magazine.
adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. 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, a musical ritual, an album and cogenerated tarot deck.
With Moderator:
Brandon Wint is a poet, spoken word artist, educator and emerging musician based in western Canada. For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performer, educator and collaborator. He has shared his work internationally, including in festivals and showcases in Latvia, Lithuania, Australia and Jamaica. His poetry has also been published in Ex-Puritan, Arc Poetry Magazine and Write Magazine, among others. He is currently the artistic director of Tree Reading Series. His debut collection of poetry is Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020).