Source: In These Times
by Aina Marzia
“The summer before Susana M. Morris turned 16 — an age when she ‘wasn’t quite grown but not a kid anymore either’ — she read Octavia Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, first encountering the Black teenage girl at its center. As an adult reckoning with America’s political climate, Morris describes Trump’s ’encouragement of violence against journalists and detractors’ as something right out of the 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents. Now a scholar of Black feminism at Georgia Tech, Morris has taught the novel countless times, noting that nearly every student reacts with the same question: How did Octavia know? New admirers of Butler’s work might otherwise struggle to imagine the Butler who faced rejection letters and once pawned her typewriter to pay bills before catching her big break years later.” (10/09/25)
https://inthesetimes.com/article/octavia-butler-biography-positive-obssession-scifi