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*The Black Weblog Awards opened their nominations. Anyone want to nominated my blog for an award? Maybe Best Writing in a Blog? Or Best Entertainment Blog? Nominations close September 6, 2013.*The Kickstarter fundraiser for the upcoming short film Roxe15 is ending in less than a week. Written and directed by Celia C. Peters, the story is about “an edgy virtual reality programmer discovers a brutal virus invading her prized software. And then the virus comes after her.”
*Below is the promo for Ytasha L. Womack’s upcoming book, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci Fi and Fantasy Culture, which “explores black sci fi culture, bleeks, black comix, and the legacy of futurism” and will be in stores on Oct. 1 2013. The official website is iAfrofuturism.
*The second The Future Weird film showcase will be August 26th at 8pm at the Spectacle Theatre in Brooklyn. This one’s theme is “Black Atlantis:”
According to Afrofuturist legend, Drexciya is a sunken land inhabited by the children of African women drowned during the Middle Passage. Since they were never born, these children continued to breathe underwater: first through amniotic fluid, then through lungs better suited to their aquatic world…
“Black Atlantis” is an evening of short films that treat water as a cleansing force through which our bodies may be reborn, and as a site of memory where disappeared and suppressed things resurface, wash up, or return to us as detritus. Through myths that traverse the Black diaspora we meet a deep-sea leviathan and encounter a beautiful and dangerous sea goddess named Mami Wata. Following tourists and then refugees fleeing Europe, we consider stories of migration, slavery and commerce, high seas adventure, and the thrill and terror of being haunted by an unknown past.
Films / Filmmakers:
Akosua Adoma Owusu ‘Drexciya’ (2010)
Simon Rittmeier ‘Drexciya’ (2012) U.S. Premiere
Kibwe Tavares
Nikyatu Jusu
Bolaji Kekere Ekun
Admission $5
*For anyone in Vancouver, Canada, The Fourth Way is a screening at the Equinox Gallery, curated by Robin Slek and Andrew Rebatta, “addressing the fundamental relationship of black identity to science fiction and electronic technology…The Fourth Way seeks to raise consciousness and critical awareness by exhibiting the artistic methodologies and aesthetics employed by those who engage with Afrofuturism and its sonic legacy. Likened to recordings of improvisational jazz, each work collapses both time and space into narratives that undermine the rigidity of dominant Western ideologies and histories related to material progress and people of color. Shifting between fact and fiction, the selected works simultaneously combine sci-fi, documentary practice, radical historiography, African cosmologies and jazz composition into their temporally non-linear narrative structures. Working empirically with source material ranging from Western popular music to archival footage of jazz performance, the methodologies employed by these artists are used to decode our present sociopolitical problems in order to provide critical tools for self-determination and social mobilization.”
The screening is September 14th.
*New Orleans artist, educator, poet, and writer Dane Verret has a new clothing line called Hepicat – conscious fashion that tells a story through his own created symbolic language, called Gola. Read more about it here.
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If you don’t know about these yet, jewelry designer and artist Rachel Stewart has a set of jewelry designs based on the works of Octavia Butler, such as Clay’s Ark, Dawn and the rest of the Xenogenesis trilogy (now Lilith’s Brood). To look at and buy the jewelry, click here. 
Sherese Francis: Futuristically Ancient 