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Registration is required to attend this in-person program. To participate, please email rsvpoctavialab@lapl.org.
Description:
Author Chi-ming Yang will read excerpts from her new book, Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse, an homage to the childhood genius of Black science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Bringing to view a selection of Butler's unpublished writings and drawings, this book traces her fascination with human-alien symbiosis to her early empathy with horses and other marginalized creatures. The figure of the horse, at once earthly and transcendent, represented the contradictions of freedom and captivity that enabled young Octavia to develop her nuanced sense of voice and place.
In the spirit of Butler's passion for library research in Pasadena and L.A., this book comprises twenty-six short A-Z chapters on vocabulary, images, and themes central to her authorial formation. It is part childhood biography, art and literary analysis, and memoir. It interweaves the author's recollections with scholarly musings on poetry, film, and literature inspired by Butler's encyclopedic reading habits and experiments with genre.
Chi-ming Yang is a Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania specializing in histories of race, empire, and East-West cultural exchanges. Her book, Performing China: Virtue, Commerce, and Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England (2011), analyzed the early China mania that overtook European consumers of literature and luxury goods. Over the past decade, her scholarship has explored the politics and aesthetics of chinoiserie, as well as cross-species encounters in poetry and art. Her recent publications on blackness, abolition, and Atlantic slavery have appeared in Early American Literature, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, British Art Studies, and The Journal of the Walters Art Museum.
The Octavia Lab is a do-it-yourself maker space located inside the Los Angeles Public Library's historic Central Library.
For ADA accommodations, call (213) 228-7430 at least 72 hours prior to the event.
Para ajustes razonables según la ley de ADA, llama al (213) 228-7430 al menos 72 horas antes del evento.