While Butler’s award-winning novel Kindred is assigned in high schools across the country, and her Parable series is more relevant now than ever before, readers of all ages should know that Octavia Estelle Butler was once a little Black girl growing up during both the civil rights movement and the space race. Only in her many novels, short stories, and essays do these two worlds collide. Her stories merge history, anthropology, sociology, biology, and technology. The biographical speculative poems in Star Child attempt to do the same. The many literary devices in poetry can be used to delve into the twists and turns of history, sink into the many layers of science, and gain greater entry into the depths of a remarkable person’s inner life. These poems aim to capture the small moments in Octavia Estelle Butler’s life and the broad ideas and events that shaped her thinking and her groundbreaking stories in the hope of inspiring a shy, inquisitive, highly imaginative child somewhere out there in the wide, wide universe.
Coincidentally, my music production name is Starchildluke but not because of Octavia Butler. At least, not directly.
(via Yahoo! News)