Ecology

New Grounds for Dutch Landscape uses an experimental, site-specific method to demonstrate how 17th century painters Jan van Goyen, Jacob van Ruisdael, and Meindert Hobbema did not so much represent the newly made landscape of Holland as reenact, through their painterly factures, its reclamation and ongoing threats to its stability: from flooding and drainage to abrasion and erosion.

These low-level dramas of recalcitrant matter allowed the Dutch to develop an ongoing temporality at odds with history painting’s decisive instant and a vocabulary of substance that wrested meaning away from humanist landscape painting’s expressive figures. — [publisher's note]

Dans Palma africana, l’anthropologue australien Michael Taussig explore la production d’huile de palme en Colombie. Alors que cette dernière envahit tout, des chips au vernis à ongles, l’auteur examine les conséquences écologiques, politiques et sociales de cette exploitation.

Bien que la liste des horreurs induites par la culture du palmier à huile soit longue, nos terminologies habituelles ne permettent plus de rendre compte des réalités qu’elles décrivent. À travers cette déambulation anthropo-poétique au cœur des marécages colombiens, c’est donc la question du langage que l’auteur interroge. Comme William Burroughs, pour qui les mots sont aussi vivants que des animaux et n’aiment pas être maintenus en pages – Michael Taussig souhaite couper ces dernières, et les rendre à leur liberté.

Pensé à partir d’une vie d’exploration philosophique et ethnographique, Palma africana cherche à contrecarrer la banalité de la destruction du monde et offre une vision pénétrante de notre condition humaine. Illustré de photographies prises par l’auteur et écrit avec la verve expérimentale propre à l’anthropologue, ce livre est le Tristes Tropiques de Michael Taussig pour le XXIe siècle.

Traduit de l’anglais par Marc Saint-Upéry.

In a context marked by the virulent return of patriarchal and white supremacist attitudes, a new generation of feminist activists are continuing the struggle: these are very feminist times. But how do these and other movements relate to the contemporary posthuman condition? 

In this important new book, Rosi Braidotti examines the implications of the posthuman turn for feminist theory and practice. She defines the posthuman turn as a convergence between posthumanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other, and she examines their complex relationship and joint impact. Braidotti claims that mainstream posthuman scholarship has neglected feminist theory, while in fact feminism is one of the precursors of the posthuman turn, through diverse social movements and political traditions. Posthuman Feminism is an analytic and creative response to contemporary conditions and a call to action. It highlights the constraints but also the potentialities available to feminist political subjects as they confront the ever-growing injustices of sexism, racism, ecocide and neoliberal capitalism. 

This bold new text by a leading feminist philosopher will be of great interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Edited by Maria Sledmere and Rhian Williams, the weird folds: everyday poems from the anthropocene is an edited anthology of poetry by contemporary UK writers, whose work manifests ecology in the body, in language, in lyric and colour and play. A book that arrives with its own weather, an acid-bright sense of urgency, detail and care; a book that speaks to a nowness that slides between crisis and the everyday arts of noticing which bear us through massive scalar change, survival and sorrow.

As Bernadette Mayer writes in 'The Way to Keep Going in Antarctica': 'Do not be afraid of your own heart beating / Look at very small things with your eyes / & stay warm'. Riffing on the etymology of 'anthology' as a gathering of flowers, this book samples from a luminous range of poets responding to 'the anthropocene' as a kind of thought device for grasping extinction, global heating and climate breakdown.

'Poems are the future sliding against the past', writes Timothy Morton in the book's foreword; these works perform the shimmering art of recognising the multiple temporalities, tenses and agencies, problems and potentials of this fraught term, 'the anthropocene'.

The weird folds intervenes in more traditional canons of nature and ecopoetry to offer a poetics of the anthropocene which is thoroughly generous, queer, sensuous, formally innovative, relational, occult, fugitive and critically sensitive to the mediations of technology and culture which shape our encounters with the more-than-human.

Amazonia: Anthology as Cosmology is devoted to Amazonia, its peoples, allies, and nonhuman spirits, and their myriad material and immaterial practices, from certain cosmopolitics and visual languages to past and present forms of resistance.

Contributions by Maria Thereza Alves & the Association of the Movement of Indigenous Agroforestry Agents of Acre (AMAAIAC), Claudia Andujar, Denilson Baniwa, Christian Bendayán, Chonon Bensho, Rita Carelli, Enrique Casanto, Felipe Castelblanco, Carolina Caycedo, Taita Hernando Chindoy, Smith Churay, Víctor Churay, Tiffany Higgins, Márcia Wayna Kambeba, knowbotiq, Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, Ailton Krenak, Gredna Landolt, Nereyda López, Renata Machado Tupinambá, Maurício Meirelles, Gerardo Petsaín, Aníbal Quijano, Maya Quilolo, Djamila Ribeiro, Abel Rodríguez (Mogaje Guihu), Pamela Rosenkranz, María Belén Saéz de Ibarra, Proyecto Cuenco de Cera (Bárbara Santos, Reynel Ortega & Stephen Hugh-Jones), Shoyan Shëca (Roldán Pinedo), Paulo Tavares, Daiara Tukano, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Santiago Yahuarcani...

Originally published in French in 1974, radical feminist theorist Francoise d'Eaubonne's Feminism or Death surveyed women's status around the globe and argued that an internationalist feminism was not just about equality but about life or death - of humans and also of the planet.

D'Eaubonne first proposed a politics of "ecofeminisme," the idea that the patriarchal system also destroys the environment, and that feminism and environmentalism must be connected.

Strangling vines and meat-hungry flora fill this unruly garden of strange stories, selected for their significance as the seeds of the "killer plant" trope in fiction, film, and video games.

Before the Demogorgon of Stranger Things and the appearance of Mario's iconic foe the Piranha Plant, writers of the 19th and early 20th centuries were exploring the lethal potential of vegetable life, inspired by new carnivorous species discovered on expeditions into the deep jungles of the world and breakthroughs in the grafting and genetics disciplines of botany. Suddenly, the exotic orchid could become a curiously alluring, yet unsettlingly bloodthirsty menace; the beautifully sprawling wisteria of the stately home could become anything but civilized, and the experimentation of botanists weening new shoots on their own blood could become fuel for a new genre of horticultural nightmare.

Every strain of vegetable threat (and one deadly fungus) can be found within this new collection, representing the very best tales from the undergrowth.

Daisy Butcher is a Gothic and Horror scholar attached to The Open Graves, Open Minds project. Her research focuses on the monstrous feminine and body horror from the 19th century Gothic short story to modern film and TV.

Published 2020

After the near-extinction of humanity, a new kind of alien-human hybrid must come to terms with their identity — before their powers destroy what is left of humankind. Since a nuclear war decimated the human population, the remaining humans began to rebuild their future by interbreeding with an alien race — the Oankali — who saved them from near-certain extinction. The Oankalis' greatest skill lies in the species' ability to constantly adapt and evolve, a process that is guided by their third sex, the ooloi, who are able to read and mutate genetic code.  

Now, for the first time in the humans' relationship with the Oankali, a human mother has given birth to an ooloi child: Jodahs. Throughout his childhood, Jodahs seemed to be a male human-alien hybrid. But when he reaches adolescence, Jodahs develops the ooloi abilities to shapeshift, manipulate DNA, cure and create disease, and more. Frightened and isolated, Jodahs must either come to terms with this new identity, learn to control new powers, and unite what's left of humankind — or become the biggest threat to their survival.

Plucked from her life on the streets of post-apocalyptic Santo Domingo, young maid Acilde Figueroa finds herself at the heart of a Santería prophecy: only she can travel back in time and save the ocean – and humanity – from disaster. But first she must become the man she always was – with the help of a sacred anemone. Tentacle is an electric novel with a big appetite and a brave vision, plunging headfirst into questions of climate change, technology, Yoruba ritual, queer politics, poverty, sex, colonialism and contemporary art. Bursting with punk energy and lyricism, it’s a restless, addictive trip: The Tempest meets the telenovela.

In Beyond the World's End T. J. Demos explores cultural practices that provide radical propositions for living in a world beset by environmental and political crises.

Rethinking relationships between aesthetics and an expanded political ecology that foregrounds just futurity, Demos examines how contemporary artists are diversely addressing urgent themes, including John Akomfrah's cinematic entanglements of racial capitalism with current environmental threats, the visual politics of climate refugees in work by Forensic Architecture and Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, and moving images of Afrofuturist climate justice in projects by Arthur Jafa and Martine Syms.

Demos considers video and mixed-media art that responds to resource extraction in works by Angela Melitopoulos, Allora & Calzadilla, and Ursula Biemann, as well as the multispecies ecologies of Terike Haapoja and Public Studio. Throughout Demos contends that contemporary intersections of aesthetics and politics, as exemplified in the Standing Rock #NoDAPL campaign and the Zad's autonomous zone in France, are creating the imaginaries that will be crucial to building a socially just and flourishing future.

In Between Gaia and Ground Elizabeth A. Povinelli theorizes the climatic, environmental, viral, and social catastrophe present as an ancestral catastrophe through which that Indigenous and colonized peoples have been suffering for centuries. In this way, the violence and philosophies the West relies on now threaten the West itself.

Engaging with the work of Glissant, Deleuze and Guattari, Césaire, and Arendt, Povinelli highlights four axioms of existence—the entanglement of existence, the unequal distribution of power, the collapse of the event as essential to political thought, and the legacies of racial and colonial histories. She traces these axioms' inspiration in anticolonial struggles against the dispossession and extraction that have ruined the lived conditions for many on the planet. By examining the dynamic and unfolding forms of late liberal violence, Povinelli attends to a vital set of questions about changing environmental conditions, the legacies of violence, and the limits of inherited Western social theory.

Between Gaia and Ground also includes a glossary of the keywords and concepts that Povinelli has developed throughout her work.

Sex Ecologies explores pleasure, affect, and the powers of the erotic in the human and more-than-human worlds. Arguing for the positive and constructive role of sex in ecology and art practice, these texts and artistic research projects attempt nothing short of reclaiming the sexual from Western erotophobia and heteronormative narratives of nature and reproduction. The artists and writers set out to examine queer ecology through the lens of environmental humanities, investigating the fluid boundaries between bodies (both human and nonhuman), between binary conceptions of nature as separate from culture, and between disciplines.

In newly commissioned texts from such writers as Mel Y. Chen and Jack Halberstam and a selection of influential essays—including an annotated version of Audre Lorde's “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power”—as well as images and sketches from works in progress by a diverse group of artists, Sex Ecologiescombines insights from the fields of art, environmental humanities, ecofeminism, gender studies, science, technology, political science, and indigenous studies.

Sex Ecologies, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at Kunsthall Trondheim, emerges from an arts-driven research project collaboratively developed between the art center and the Seed Box environmental humanities collaboratory. Conceived not as a result but as a seed arising from this transdisciplinary fertilization, the volume presents a case for the role of sex in environmental and social justice.

Contributors:

Katja Aglert,Tarsh Bates, adrienne maree brown, Mel Y. Chen, Pauline Doutreluingne, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jes Fan, Ibrahim Fazlic, Jack Halberstam, niilas helander, Stefanie Hessler, Jenny Hval, Anne Duk Hee Jordan, Jessie Kleemann, Audre Lorde, Nina Lykke, Montserrat Madariaga-Caro, Camila Marambio, Astrida Neimanis, Pedro Neves Marques, Okwui Okpokwasili, Marie Helene Pereira, Margrethe Pettersen, Laure Prouvost, Filipa Ramos, Catriona Sandilands, Sami Schalk, Serubiri Moses, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens, Kim TallBear, Anna Tje, Alberta Whittle, Victoria Wibeck, Elvia Wilk

Copublished with Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway) and the Seed Box (Sweden)

ROT, LANGUAGE & A STRAY BUTTERFLY

CONTRIBUTORS Eady van Acker, Anouk Asselineau & Myrto Vratsanou, Britt Browne, Finca Tierra Negra, Yuri Hasegawa, Celine Caly, Aimilia Efthimiou & Comfy Shrooms, Paige Emery, Elizaveta Federmesser, Edwin Godínez, Meg Hadfield, Freya Häberlein, Johanna Hedva, Zsófia Jakab, Lijuan Klassen, Marijn van der Leeuw, Juliette Lizotte, Niklaus Mettler & Anja Wille-Schori, Hatty Nestor, Kamila Sipika, Zazie Stevens & Alex Valentina.

DAISYWORLD MAGAZINE is a seasonal art publication on perception, the sensory, the non-human, ecology & erotica with an emphasis on interconnectedness. The artist's intimate knowledge based on observation, questioning anthropocentrism through beauty & language. Reflecting on the past season while softly moving into the next, each issue launches in-between seasons; appreciating experience, transition, and metamorphosis instead of anticipating the next big thing

Cover image: Zazie Stevens

In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events. 

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.

In a reality in which the boundaries between cinema, art, installation and multimedia experimentation seem to be increasingly blurred, History of a Tree by Flatform is a project that sets out to radically alter the idea of the portrait in western art. 

A non-human living organism – the Oak of the Hundred Knights of Tricase, the oldest Vallonea oak in Europe at the age of 900 years – and the territory in which it has stood for centuries become the subject: through a film and a robotized video installation, statements become a portrait, and are transformed into a work of art. 

The book retraces the genesis, development and implementation of this original idea, providing a visual score, the film in 80 images, dialogues in ten languages, the contributions of a tree searcher, an art historian and two philosophers, as well as a series of in-depth essays drawing on the fields of science, history, anthropology, music and linguistics. 

TEKELI-LI in "Mountains of Madness" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft is a scream that frightens polar explorers upon their arrival in a hidden city at the South Pole. An online bibliography listing Antarctic fictions is called the same.

Taking the shape of an encyclopedia and an adventure book, "Tekeli-li" is the first catalogue of artist Judith Neunhäuserer, mapping the various elements constituting her œuvre and research. This book includes a special ephemera: a handmade recycled A4 made from the publications used during her research. 

A documentary and speculative publication on a genealogy of political, social, ecological and identity-based struggles in the Brittany region and the West of France, from the 1960s to the Zone to Defend of today, based on numerous documents and films made by filmmakers and collectives.

Published following the eponymous exhibition at Grand Café, Saint-Nazaire, in 2019.

Texts by Isabelle Cambourakis, Jade Lindgaard, Élise Roullaud; interviews with Jean-Louis Le Tacon, Patrick Prado, Joseph Potiron, Olivier Tric. 
Graphic design: Laure Giletti & Grégory Dapra.
 
published in September 2021

For centuries, the garden has been regarded as a mirror of society, a microcosm, in which the broader relationships between nature and culture are played out on  small scale. From this long cultural tradition also raises a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the Earth.

On the Necessity of Gardening tells the story of the garden as a rich source of inspiration. Over the centuries, artists, writers, poets and thinkers have each described, depicted and designed the garden in different ways. In medieval art, the garden was a reflection of paradise, a place of harmony and fertility, shielded from worldly problems.

However, the garden is not just a neutral place and intended solely for personal pastime, it is a place where the world manifests itself and where the relationship between culture and nature is expressed. In the eighteenth century this image shifted: the garden became a symbol of worldly power and politics. The Anthropocene, the era in which man completely dominates nature with disastrous consequences, is forcing us to radically rethink the role we have given nature in recent decades.

There is a renewed interest in the theme of the garden among contemporary makers. It is not a romantic desire that drives them, but rather a call for a new awareness of our relationship with the earth, by connecting different fields of activity in landscape, art and culture. Through many different essays and an extensive abecedarium, On the Necessity of Gardening reflects on the garden as a metaphor for society, through concepts such as botanomania and capitalocene, from guerrilla gardening to queer ecology and zen garden.

Contributors: Maria Barnas, Jonny Bruce, Laurie Cluitmans, Thiëmo Heilbron, Liesbeth M. Helmus, Erik A. de Jong, René de Kam, Alhena Katsof, Jamaica Kincaid, Bart Rutten, Catriona Sandilands, Patricia de Vries.

At a time when few women could write and most were denied a formal education, Hildegard von Bingen became a legendary healer, visionary, musician, artist, poet, and saint. In Physica, Hildegard presents nine "books" of healing systems: Plants, Elements, Trees, Stones, Fish, Birds, Animals, Reptiles, and Metals. In each book she discusses the qualities of these natural creations and elaborates on their medicinal use, explaining how to prepare and apply different remedies. With its emphasis on balancing the humors, Physica has strong affinity with the Oriental medical approaches gaining great respect today.

The modern reader interested in natural healing will recognize the enormous truth in the theories of this twelth-century physician, many of which prove effective today, serving as a reminder that our cures for illness depend on our natural world and our place in it.

As Hildegard states in Physica, "With earth was the human being created. All the elements served mankind and, sensing that he was alive, they busied themselves in aiding his life in every way."

Translated by Priscilla Throop a Latin and Greek scholar, she holds a master's degree from the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto, as well as a Certificate of Advanced Theological Studies from the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge. She is a member of the Vermont Classical Language Association and is currently translating Isidore of Seville's Etymologiae. She lives in Charlotte, Vermont.

Ideas, utopian propositions and practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting empathically with the world around us.

This book brings together ideas and projects that seek to define a new role for design based on empathy.

As a mediator of emotions and feelings, design is presented here as a practice that takes care as its main purpose. Designers adopt sensitive, diplomatic, sometimes therapeutic functions, with the aim of connecting us with one another but also with the world around us, with other species, with soil, water and even the universe. In this book, the reader will find new ideas, utopian propositions but also practical solutions for reinterpreting and reconnecting with the world around them. Taking food as a key medium of encounter, both between people and also with the more than human world, the designers featured in this book consciously operate in a multi-scalar realm – from the invisible microbial life that lives in our gut to the vast landscapes transformed by agricultural practices. Designs for more than one are those that take into consideration not just their immediate user or client but the many constituents inevitably impacted by any new object or action.

Edited by Mariana Pestana with Sumitra Upham and Billie Muraben.

With written contributions by Ekin Ozbicer, Mariana Pestana, Susan Lanzoni, Naz Şahin, Billie Muraben, Sumitra Upham, FRAUD, Luigi Coppola and Vivien Sansour and Pelin Tan, Aslıhan Demirtaş, Black Athena Collective, theOtherDada, TiriLab, Counterspace, Anna Puigjaner (MAIO) with Alina Abouelenin, Aslı Uludağ, Dele Adeyemo, Young Curators Group, Eylül Şenses, Ulya Soley, Nur Horsanalı, Studio Ossidiana, Orkan Telhan + elii, Ibiye Camp, Ben Thorp Brown, Paula Gaetano Adi, Meriem Bennani, Calum Bowden, Jawa El Khash, Emmy Bacharach, Alice dos Reis, Macedo Cannat, Future Anecdotes.

A collective book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views.

The Vita Nova editorial project had its genesis in the Fórum do Futuro: a programme of debates, artist talks, and performances, held annually in the city of Porto, that brings together guests from different artistic and scientific practices to reflect on fundamental issues for contemporary societies. Given the impossibility of holding the 2020 edition, due to the challenges posed by the pandemic, the Fórum do Futuro is instead presenting a book that proposes to question human and non-human existence in the current social context, spanning different cosmogonic views. The book consists of four thematic sections that combine different artistic, scientific, philosophical and technological perspectives in written and visual essays, stories and interviews.

Texts by Sophia Al-Maria, K Allado-McDowell, Shumon Basar, Guilherme Blanc, Rosi Braidotti, Octavia Butler, Ted Chiang, GPT-3, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Kirsten Keller, Filipa Ramos, Tabita Rezaire, Jenna Sutela, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Suzanne Treister, Aby Warburg, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Feifei Zhou.

An illustrated examination of Beverly Buchanan's 1981 environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination. 

Beverly Buchanan's Marsh Ruins (1981) are large, solid mounds of cement and shell-based tabby concrete, yet their presence has always been elusive. Hiding in the tall grasses and brackish waters of the Marshes of Glynn, on the southeast coast of Georgia, the Marsh Ruins merge with their surroundings as they enact a curious and delicate tension between destruction and endurance. This volume offers an illustrated examination of Buchanan's environmental sculpture, which exists in an ongoing state of ruination.

The story of the artistic collaboration between the originators of the ecosex movement, their diverse communities, and the Earth.

What's sexy about saving the planet? Funny you should ask. Because that is precisely, or, perhaps, broadly, what Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens have spent many years bringing to light in their live art, exhibitions, and films. In 2008, Sprinkle and Stephens married the Earth, which set them on the path to explore the realms of ecosexuality as they became lovers with the Earth and made their mutual pleasure an embodied expression of passion for the environment. Ever since, they have been not just pushing but obliterating the boundaries circumscribing biology and ecology, creating ecosexual art in their performance of an environmentalism that is feminist, queer, sensual, sexual, posthuman, materialist, exuberant, and steeped in humor.

Assuming the Ecosexual Position tells of childhood moments that pointed to a future of ecosexuality, for Annie, in her family swimming pool in Los Angeles; for Beth, savoring forbidden tomatoes from the vine on her grandparents' Appalachian farm. The book describes how the two came together as lovers and collaborators, how they took a stand against homophobia and xenophobia, and how this union led to the miraculous conception of the Love Art Laboratory, which involved influential performance artists Linda M. Montano, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, and feminist pornographer Madison Young. Stephens and Sprinkle share the process of making interactive performance art, including the Chemo Fashion Show, Cuddle, Sidewalk Sex Clinics, and Ecosex Walking Tours. Over the years, they celebrated many more weddings to various nature entities, from the Appalachian Mountains to the Adriatic Sea. To create these weddings, they collaborated with hundreds of people and invited thousands of guests as they vowed to love, honor, and cherish the many elements of the Earth.

As entertaining as it is deeply serious, and arriving at a perilous time of sharp differences and constricting categories, the story of this artistic collaboration between Sprinkle, Stephens, their diverse communities, and the Earth opens gender and sexuality, art and environmentalism, to the infinite possibilities and promise of love.

In this graphic novel adaptation of Octavia E. Butler's Parable of the Sower by Damian Duffy and John Jennings, the award-winning team behind Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, the author portrays a searing vision of America's future. In the year 2024, the country is marred by unattended environmental and economic crises that lead to social chaos. Lauren Olamina, a preacher's daughter living in Los Angeles, is protected from danger by the walls of her gated community. However, in a night of fire and death, what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny... and the birth of a new faith.

In the year 2024, the country is marred by unattended environmental and economic crises that lead to social chaos. Lauren Olamina, a preacher's daughter living in Los Angeles, is protected from danger by the walls of her gated community. However, in a night of fire and death, what begins as a fight for survival soon leads to something much more: a startling vision of human destiny... and the birth of a new faith.

Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006) was a renowned African American author who was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" Grant and PEN West Lifetime Achievement Award for her body of work. Since her death, sales of her books have increased enormously as the issues she addressed in her Afro-futuristic feminist novels and short fiction have only become more relevant. Damian Duffy, author of Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation and Parable of the Sower: A Graphic Novel Adaptation, is a cartoonist, scholar, writer, and teacher. He holds a MS and PhD in library and information sciences from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he is on faculty. John Jennings is the curator of the Megascope list and illustrator of the graphic-novel adaptations of Octavia E. Butler's Kindred and Parable of the Sower. He is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside.

Published July 2021