“The child in each of us
Knows paradise.
Paradise is home.
Home as it was
Or home as it should have been.
Paradise is one's own place,
One's own people,
One's own world,
Knowing and known,
Perhaps even
Loving and loved.
Yet every child
Is cast from paradise-
Into growth and new community,
Into vast, ongoing
Change.”
—Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower
[Photo: National Women's Hall of Fame]
Happy Black Futures month, John! ✨
This month, we’re celebrating a GLOBAL Black future. Blackness knows no borders. Black Joy, Black creativity, Black art transcend country, language, and background.
Our creativity is our inheritance and our weapon across the diaspora. That’s why this entire month we will be highlighting Black leaders, communities, and creatives who shifted the culture globally and contributed to our global fight for liberation.
And today, we’re starting with Octavia Butler.
If you’re not familiar with the legendary Octavia Butler and her works, you are truly missing out.
Thankfully you have us to start your education in one of the mothers of science fiction and a badass Black author who changed the genre forever.
It’s impossible to ignore the parallels between Octavia Butler’s works and our reality. It almost feels like she could see into the future. Black authors whose genius withstands the test of time like hers NEED to be celebrated.
Octavia Butler in her estate’s own words:
“Was a renowned African American author who received a MacArthur “Genius” Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Born in Pasadena in 1947, she was raised by her mother and her grandmother. She was the author of several award-winning novels including…Parable of the Talents (1995) winner of the Nebula Award for the best science fiction novel published that year. She was acclaimed for her lean prose, strong protagonists, and social observations in stories that range from the distant past to the far future.
Though the MacArthur Grant made life easier in later years, she struggled for decades when her dystopian novels exploring themes of Black injustice, global warming, women’s rights and political disparity were, to say the least, not in commercial demand.”
This is a tale as old as time. Way too many of our culture-defining Black legends only receive their flowers well too late into the game.
Together, we seek to honor revolutionaries like Octavia Butler by uplifting their works and by doing the work to prevent the dystopian futures she wrote about.
If you haven’t yet, you should add a few (or all!) of her novels to your reading list for 2025.
Onwards,
Black Lives Matter
Our grassroots movement is pushing for Black liberation every single day. We are striving to create a world where Black people do so much more than just survive. It’s time we thrive.
As an organization one of our biggest hurdles is consistency.
A recurring contribution of anything you can afford goes a long way as we plan for the months, years, and even decades ahead. This is the most effective way for small-dollar donors (like you) to power our Black liberation work.
Will you make a recurring contribution of $5 or more today so that we can keep building momentum for our movement?
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