Remembering Octavia Butler who would’ve been 79 years old yesterday.
I first read her work in my freshman year of college in Intro to African-American Literature. It was the first English class I took in college, and I was excited to sign up for it as the student who once complained that all we read were white male authors in AP English, only for the next day my teacher to slap a copy of Toni Morrison’s Beloved on my desk and walk away.
The last novel we read in Professor Gunning’s college class was Kindred and the class so changed how I viewed literature and the world that I still have the coursepack and syllabus safely filed away, all these years later.
Sharing this quote to honor and remember Octavia Butler, and because this quote seems particularly significant today.