Hallie Ford Literary Series: Walidah Imarisha

Please join us for the first event in the Spring 2016 Hallie Ford Literary Series at Willamette, a talk and reading by Walidah Imarisha, co-editor of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements. The talk will take place on Thursday, February 4, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hatfield Room of Willamette’s library. The event is free and open to the public, and books will be for sale courtesy of the Willamette Store.

Octavia’s Brood is the first anthology of its kind to gather science fiction that explores the genre as a means of political expression, of imagining a world free of war, racism, and oppression. The anthology was named one of the top ten feminist books of 2015 by Ms. Magazine, and CBC Radio called it the best new science fiction/fantasy book of the season.

Walidah is a poet, journalist, and fiction writer, who has taught in Portland State University’s Black Studies Department, Oregon State University’s Women Gender Sexuality Studies Department, and Southern New Hampshire University’s English Department. For the past six years, she has presented all over Oregon as a public scholar with Oregon Humanities’ Conversation Project on topics such as Oregon Black history, alternatives to incarceration, and the history of hip hop. One half of the poetry duo Good Sista/Bad Sista, she has published poetry in a wide variety of journals and performed at venues across the country. Walidah also spent six years on the board of the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, and helped to found the Human Rights Coalition, a group of prisoners’ families and former prisoners with three chapters in Pennsylvania.

Read an interview with Walidah and her co-editor Adrienne Brown at The Nation: http://www.thenation.com/article/why-science-fiction-fabulous-tool-fight-social-justice/

Scott Nadelson