About this Event
Join us for Voices Across the Sound: Octavia E. Butler, Black Futures, and Freedom, a special Juneteenth-centered conversation at this June.
Grounded in the visionary legacy of Octavia E. Butler, this event brings together writers, thinkers, and cultural workers to reflect on Black futures, liberation, memory, imagination, and freedom. Together, the panel will explore how Butler’s work continues to shape conversations about justice, possibility, and the worlds we are called to build.
Participants
Amber Flame (Moderator)
Kathya Alexander
Nisi Shawl
This event invites the community into a timely and powerful conversation in honor of Juneteenth, centering Black thought, storytelling, and futurity.
Come gather with us for an evening of reflection, dialogue, and visionary exchange.
About Amber Flame
Amber Flame is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, activist and educator, whose work has garnered residencies with Hedgebrook, Baldwin for the Arts, The Watering Hole, Vermont Studio Center, and YEFE NOF. A former church kid from the Southwest, Flame’s work has been published in diverse arenas, including Def Jam Poetry, Nailed Magazine, Winter Tangerine, The Dialogist, Split This Rock, Black Heart Magazine, Sundress Publications, CityArts Magazine, FreezeRay, Redivider Journal and more. In her writing, Flame explores spirituality and sexuality, cross-woven with themes of grief and loss, motherhood and magic, and the interstitial joy in it all. A 2016 and 2017 Pushcart Prize nominee, and Jack Straw Writer Program alum, Amber Flame's first full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Cruelty, was published in 2017 through Write Bloody Press. Flame was a recipient of the CityArtist grant from Seattle's Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs to write, produce and perform her one-person play, Hands Above the Covers, a series of character monologues drawn from diverse real-life interviews. Read more here.
About Kathya Alexander
Kathya Alexander is an author, playwright, storyteller, and teaching artist. She was a Writer-in-Residence at Hedgebrook Writer’s Retreat and won the Fringe First Award for Black to My Roots: African American Tales from the Head and the Heart in Edinburgh, Scotland. Read more here.
About Nisi Shawl
When she was little, she told her middle sister Julie convoluted tales of how she, a mermaid, had come to dwell in the small midwestern town of Kalamazoo, Michigan. This odyssey involved the Saint Lawrence Seaway, several of the Great Lakes, and mysterious underground passages her schoolteacher called aquifers. Her own origin was much simpler, of course; their parents, she explained, had found her in a garbage can.
At sixteen, in 1971, she moved from Kalamazoo to Ann Arbor to attend the University of Michigan's Residential College. She took several French courses, Oral History, Cosmology, and a poetry seminar that taught her ten weeks of nothing. Most classes took place in the dorm, and she got a job in the dorm's library. One day, she was startled to notice an extremely short person walking towards her. They were less than two feet high. It took her several seconds to realize that this was a child. Read more here.
About Rasheedah Phillips
Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, parent, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer who uses web-based projects,zines, short film, archival practices, experimental non-fiction, speculative fiction, printmaking, performance, social practice, installation and creative research to explore the construct of time, temporalities, and community futurisms through a Black futurist cultural lens and experience. Phillips' writing and artwork has appeared in The Funambulist Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Flash Art Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, Recess Arts, and more. Phillips is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, co-creator of the Community Futures Lab, and creator of the Black Women Temporal Portal, Time Zone Protocols, and Black Time Belt projects. Phillips also recently created the Spatial Futures Initiative, housed at PolicyLink. Read more here.
About NAAM
The Northwest African American Museum is an anti-racist, pro-equity, affirming gathering place of hope, help, and healing for the entire Northwest region that is building intergenerational cultural wealth.
At the heart of the African American experience in the Northwest is the story of our journey to this region, the establishment of our vibrant community, and the ways in which we have survived. To tell this ever-unfolding story, the Museum’s exhibitions and programs feature the visual arts, music, crafts, literature, and history of African Americans in the Northwest. Cognizant of the black community’s continuous evolution, NAAM focuses on African Americans whose route to the new world was through slavery as well as recent immigrants arriving from places such as Somalia, Sudan, and Ethiopia. Read more here.
About Aunt Lute
Aunt Lute Books is an intersectional, feminist press dedicated to publishing literature by those who have been traditionally underrepresented in or excluded by the literary canon. Core to Aunt Lute’s mission is the belief that the written word is critical to understanding and relating to each other as humans. Through the sharing of stories, we strengthen ties across cultures and experiences, and at the same time honor the hurt, loss, and harm incurred through structural power imbalances, prejudiced and gendered systems, and ancestral trauma. We uplift these voices in order to build a more just future. Read more here.
About Sistah Scifi
Started in 2019 by Isis Asare, Sistah Scifi is the first Back-owned book store focused on science fiction and fantasy in the US, as validated by the American Booksellers Association. Located primarily in cyberspace, Sistah Scifi launched three Sistah Scifi Book Vending Machines at Chapter510, located at 546 9th St, Oakland, CA 94607, and Northwest African American Museum and Distant Worlds Coffee in Seattle, WA, in 2022. Read more here.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Northwest African American Museum, 2300 South Massachusetts Street, Seattle, United States
USD 0.00
