PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Octavia Estelle Butler (1947-2006), often referred to as the grand dame of science fiction, was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena Community College, and also attended California State University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles. Butler was the first science-fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship ( genius grant). She is widely considered the best science-fiction writer of her generation and is beloved in feminist literary circles, and her many works are widely included in women's studies syllabi. She won the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and the Nebula and Hugo Awards, among others. John Jennings is Associate Professor of Visual Studies at SUNY-Buffalo and has written several works on African-American comics creators. His research is concerned with the topics of representation and authenticity, visual culture, visual literacy, social justice, and design pedagogy. He is an accomplished designer, curator, illustrator, cartoonist, and award-winning graphic novelist. His work overlaps into various disciplines including American Studies, African American Studies, Design History, Media Studies, Sociology, Women and Gender Studies, and Literature. Damian Duffy, cartoonist, writer, and comics letterer, is a PhD student in the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and a founder of the Eye Trauma Comix collective (eyetrauma.net). His first published graphic novel, The Hole: Consumer Culture, created with artist John Jennings, was released by Front 40 Press in 2008. Along with Jennings, Duffy has curated several comics art shows, including Other Heroes: African American Comics Creators, Characters, and Archetypes and Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics, and published the art book Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art & Culture. Duffy has also published academic essays in comics form about curation, new media, diversity, and critical pedagogy.
"""Adapting any prose novel to the graphic format is an audacious undertaking at the best of times, but translating Octavia E. Butler’s fearsomely powerful work in particular must surely have been a herculean task. Yet Damian Duffy and John Jennings have managed it…A worthy and powerful supplement to a classic.” * The New York Times * “Awash in burnished ambers and potent violets, this illustrated adaptation of Butler’s 1979 time-traveling classic about a black woman from ’70s California suddenly transplanted to the 19th-century South amplifies the original’s visceral grace.” * O, The Oprah Magazine *"
