I majored in English, and I sought out creative writing classes and literature classes that specialized in the African Diaspora. I didn’t encounter Octavia Butler’s fiction in university, either. I found sustenance in literary writers and in science fiction and fantasy writers, too, needing the escapism of that kind of storytelling, which I had been drawn to since I was a small child and first read Tamora Pierce and Robin McKinley-but the only science fiction and fantasy I could find in my school library were by Frank Herbert, J. I spent those years wandering through my school library stacks, finding books by Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Richard Wright, Gabriel García Márquez, and Margaret Atwood. I lived in my grandmother’s four-bedroom house with fourteen other relatives and watched my extended family bear the brunt of poverty and racism throughout my childhood and adolescence. I had grown up in a poor/working-class family in rural Mississippi, where I spent years eating government cheese, red beans, and rice, and drinking powdered milk. I never encountered her in my coursework, as my required reading looked nothing like the books I found in my personal reading: I read The Last of the Mohicans, Catch-22, and The Catcher in the Rye and little there resonated with the world I knew. By Jesmyn Ward I can’t remember when I first read Octavia Butler’s work.
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