*Tonight illustrator and animator Tim Fielder will be sharing his work Matty’s Rocket— an episodic-animated series & web comic. The event will have guest appearances and readings from writers Liza Jessie Peterson and Melanie Maria Goodreaux. They will read Afrofuturistic pieces aloud while Fielder will illustrate their work on the spot!
*Accra Dot Alt will be returning tonight with their Talk Party Series in Ghana celebrating singer Tawiah’s mixtape Freedom Drop.
*Today, the filmmakers for the upcoming film, Oya: Rise of the Orisha, opened their Indiegogo page. The film “focuses on a young woman named Adesuwa who has the unique ability to transform into the fearsome warrior goddess, Oya, the Orisha of change. When she changes, she gains amazing abilities. We follow Adesuwa as she goes on a head-stomping mission to keep the doorway between the Orisha and humanity closed. Be prepared for an action packed , mystical adventure as we explore the world of the Orisha.”
*Live Unchained is also conducting a Indiegogo campaign for their awards ceremony, “Terrifying, Strange & Beautiful.” The title based on one of poet Warsan Shire’s poems, “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love,” and she is also one of the collaborators on the ceremony. Also take a look at some of the visual artists work that they are including as perks on their page.
*The Carl Brandon Society is offering the Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars for those who donate $8.01 to their scholarship fund.
*Call for Papers: Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, Issue 3: Feminist Science Fiction:
“In the 1985 essay that defined the terms for feminist thinking about science and technology in the decades since, Donna Haraway observed that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” She drew together the cybernetic organisms of fact and fiction, the beings of shiny technology and messy biological stuff, and her terms and her ideas came as much from the creative thinkers of feminist science fiction (Octavia Butler, Joanna Russ) as they did from technologists, political thinkers, and philosophers.
It’s 2013, and the cyborg manifesto is old enough to vote. Where are feminist science fictions now, and what can they tell us about feminism and technology? New media make our experiences of social reality resonant with classics of speculative fiction, particularly works that accounted for the uneven distribution of futuristic technologies and their participation in hierarchies of race, gender, capital, and ability. Literary scholars continue to explore the intricacies of works by Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr., Joanna Russ, et al., while the aesthetic and political techniques of critical and creative speculative thinking that these writers pioneered are taken up in multiple forms. Fiction writers like Nalo Hopkinson, Andrea Hairston, L. Timmel Duchamp, and many more bring questions of language, culture, race, and violence into the fray, as social media platforms like blogs, twitter, and Facebook deepen conversations between writers and fans. Small presses continue to support the older technology of the printed page and to articulate why written visions matter for a possible feminist future…”
For more info, click here.
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 