In this dialogue, award-winning author Nnedi Okorafor and ASU’s Matt Bell will discuss the premodern influences on Okorafor’s writing across a variety of media—television, novels, novellas, short stories, graphic novels, and more.
By engaging the culture, history, and mythology of premodern and contemporary Nigeria, Okorafor creates science fiction and fantasy narratives that don’t privilege the Western world. Instead, her writing asks, what are the different, more inclusive, futures we can imagine?
This event is virtual, and will be hosted via Zoom Webinar. It is free and open to everyone. Learn more and register!
Update: The event is currently sold out, but we encourage you to join the waitlist at the Eventbrite page. The event will also be livestreamed at the Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Studies YouTube page.
About Nnedi Okorafor
Nnedi Okorafor is a Nigerian-American author of Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism for children and adults. Her works include Who Fears Death (in development at HBO into a TV series), the Binti novella trilogy, The Book of Phoenix, the Akata books and Lagoon. She is the winner of Hugo, Nebula, World Fantasy, Locus and Lodestar Awards and her debut novel Zahrah the Windseeker won the prestigious Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature. Her next novel, Ikenga, will be in stores August 2020.
Nnedi has also written comics for Marvel, including Black Panther: Long Live the King and Wakanda Forever (featuring the Dora Milaje) and the Shuri series, an Africanfuturist comic series Laguardia (from Dark Horse) and her short memoir Broken Places and Outer Spaces. Nnedi is also cowriter the adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Wild Seed with Viola Davis and Kenyan film director Wanuri Kahiu. Nnedi holds a PhD (literature) and two MAs (journalism and literature). She lives with her daughter Anyaugo and family in Illinois.
This event is sponsored by the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, the Center for Science and the Imagination, and the Virginia G. Piper Center for Creative Writing.