Headliner

“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, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, Black feminist Afrofuturist writer, scholar, and cultural critic Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story within the historical and social contexts that influenced the ideas central to her celebrated writing. Similarly, in Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde, researcher Alexis Pauline Gumbs 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 Isis Asare 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

This chilling and visionary conversation brings together three groundbreaking voices in contemporary horror and speculative fiction who use storytelling to interrogate history, identity, and the legacies that refuse to stay buried. Through unsettling narratives and fearless imagination, they reveal how horror becomes a vital tool for reckoning, resistance, and truth-telling.

Tananarive Due, award-winning author and scholar, is a leading force in Black horror and speculative fiction whose work draws on Black history, family, and lived experience to explore generational trauma, injustice, and survival. From the multi-award-winning The Reformatory to classics like The Good House and My Soul to Keep, Due transforms real-world horrors into powerful narratives of memory and reckoning. Stephen Graham Jones, The New York Times bestselling author and professor, reshapes contemporary horror through Indigenous perspectives that challenge colonial myths and genre conventions. In works such as The Buffalo Hunters Hunter, The Only Good Indians, and My Heart Is a Chainsaw, he interrogates violence, belonging, and cultural endurance with relentless innovation and emotional force.

Moderated by Ayize Jama-Everett, novelist and cultural thinker whose own boundary-defying work spans horror, science fiction, philosophy, and spirituality, this conversation will explore how horror functions as cultural critique, creative liberation, and a mirror to the fears societies try to bury. Join us for a compelling discussion on the power of horror to illuminate hidden histories, disrupt dominant narratives, and imagine new ways of surviving and storytelling in a haunted world.

Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland

To write an inclusive future, we must publish diverse voices who represent our collective interests and stories. The publishers and imprints represented in this headliner panel will discuss the implications of the current political climate on the future of publishing and put forward creative solutions to the lack of opportunities for publishing underrepresented stories. Tiny Reparations Press, founded by standup comedian, bestselling author, producer, and actress Phoebe Robinson, is a highly curated imprint dedicated to fiction and nonfiction that pushes the conversation forward. HeartDrum, an acclaimed imprint of HarperChildren’s featuring stories that emphasize the present and future of Native peoples and the strength of young Indigenous heroes, will be represented by its author-curator and award-winning writer Cynthia Leitich Smith. Turning the page to publishers, Palestinian American author and book worker Hannah Moushabeck runs Interlink Publishing alongside her family, the only Palestinian-owned independent publishing house in the United States offering global perspectives to readers through works of literature-in-translation, history, activism, politics, art, cultural guides, award-winning cookbooks, and illustrated children’s books. Through publishing talented writers whose works have been overlooked by large-scale publishers, co-founder Kate Gale of Red Hen Press fosters diversity, promotes literacy in local schools, and supports the Greater Los Angeles Area and international communities with arts-based events and literary advocacy. Moderated by acting Co-CEO of the intersectional, feminist press Aunt Lute, María Mínguez Arias, this inspiring panel is a celebration of the innovative and diverse members of the publishing industry dedicated to creatively curating and publishing the voices of our future.

Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland

In the midst of white nationalism, global capitalism, and authoritarian regimes that drive individualism and isolation, a look to our past and envisioned futures reveals the prevailing strength of creativity and rebellion across time. By surveying a world that has changed dramatically since 1960 in her book The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change, historian and activist Rebecca Solnit unveils the sheer breadth and scale of social, political, scientific, and cultural changes that have shaped a more interconnected, relational world which embraces antiracism, feminism, a more expansive understanding of gender, environmental thinking, scientific breakthroughs, and Indigenous and non-Western ideas. Because transformation is obscured within a longer arc of history, its scale is seldom recognized, but change is inevitable, brought about by dismantling an old civilization and building a new one, whose newness is often the return of the old ways and wisdoms. Poet, performer, and director Saul Williams charts his own creative visions for change in Martyr Loser King, his graphic novel about a global cyberattack rebellion in a small East African country where the Black population and the land are exploited for the mining of the precious ore coltan. Simultaneously a cautionary tale and hopeful vision for the future, this cyberpunk fable raises incisive questions about capitalism, colonialism, and the future of technology. Moderated by writer, producer, and activist Christie George, who is working at the intersection of media, technology, and social change, this headlining conversation features the creative minds who are mapping and shaping the trajectory of our futures despite the forces seeking to turn back the clock on history.

Illustrator Morgan Sörne will join for book signing after this headliner conversation.

Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland

What happens when visionary worldbuilding meets movement building? In this rare and unmissable conversation, acclaimed novelist Nnedi Okorafor, whose Africanfuturist fiction reshapes the boundaries of speculative literature, sits down with legendary organizer Marshall Ganz, architect of modern grassroots leadership models. Guided by writer, educator, and visionary thinker Walidah Imarisha, the conversation will travel across story and structure, imagination and power. Together, they will ask: How do the stories we tell determine the futures we fight for? How does organizing become a living narrative of hope and resistance? And how can collective imagination move us closer to liberation? This will be a gathering of minds that reminds us that crafting worlds and building movements are acts born of the same radical impulse: to dream together, and remake what has been made.

Introductory live music performance by Bushwick Book Club Oakland