Michele Berger and Lilly Nguyen discuss Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower
Wed 11/8, 7pm:
Michele Berger and Lilly Nguyen discuss Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower
The themes within the acclaimed science fiction novel Parable of the Sower are more relevant than ever. Whether you are a longtime Octavia E. Butler fan or new to her works, join us at Flyleaf Books for an engaging community conversation on what the book teaches us about gender, race, and the very future of our civilization.
Author and associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill Michele Tracy Berger will lead this talk with her colleague Lilly U. Nguyen, with insights on how Butler’s work has propelled their own, and how it can relate to, inform, and inspire other lives.
This is part of a free event series celebrating the US premiere of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower at Carolina Performing Arts, an opera created, written, and composed by Toshi Reagon and Bernice Johnson Reagon. Visit www.carolinaperformingarts.org/parable for information on the opera and other events in this series.
Michele Tracy Berger is associate professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill and Director of the Faculty Fellows Program at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities.Her research, teaching, and practice all focus on intersectional approaches to studying areas of inequality, especially racial and gender health disparities. This work spans the fields of public health, sociology and women's and gender studies.
She is also a creative writer. Her main love is writing speculative fiction, though she also is known to write poetry and creative nonfiction, too. Her essay about Octavia Butler was recently published in Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia Butler (Twelfth Planet Press). Her sci-fi novella “Reenu-You” , about a mysterious virus transmitted through a "natural" hair relaxer, was recently published by Book Smugglers Publishing.
Lilly U. Nguyen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies at UNC-Chapel Hill. Her research and writing draw from the diverse fields of information studies, feminist science and technology studies, and Asian American studies. With a focus on Vietnam and the Vietnamese diaspora, her scholarship asks how tenable is difference as a value to uphold when marginalized people seek to establish themselves as modern subjects and as racial equals through the work of technology and time?
