About

 

I am a writer and teacher who was a science fiction fan from the time I learned how to read. Growing up in rural Iowa near the small working-class city of Ottumwa made me always aware of struggles over environments, ecologies, science, technology, and historical memory. The land and sky held us up but the waterways were poisoned by agricultural and industrial extraction, while Iowa cancer rates are among the highest in the nation. The land and waterways were also archives holding memories of Black miners and Meskwaki families who lived there before we did. My mother, a self-taught stained glass artist, dug up rocks, tools, and fragments of household items on our land, and together we did research to piece together the stories, a practice I have continued in different ways.

After I left Iowa for college, I discovered my lifelong intellectual work of excavating archives illuminating struggles over class, race, empire, and environments. Now Professor of Literature and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, San Diego, my interests and commitments come together in my book Science Fiction Ecologies: World-making with Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Judith Merril, which is forthcoming in October 2026 from New York University Press. Braiding together the lives, archives, and speculative fiction of Butler, Le Guin, and Merril, this collective biography and counter-history of science fiction world-making illuminates three generations of ecological and environmental speculation, memory work, and struggles over libraries, public education, empire, feminism, and the future.

My new book Science Fiction Ecologies builds on my 2018 book Imagining the Future of Climate Change: World-Making through Science Fiction and Activism. Here I focus on social movements led by Indigenous people and people of color that are at the forefront of challenging the greatest threat to our environment: the fossil fuel industry. Their stories and movements—in the real world and through science fiction—help us all better understand the relationship between activism and culture, and how both can be valuable tools in creating our future. 

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Doing archival research is important to me in all of my projects. Instead of following the paper trails of rich and powerful people, however, I seek out archives that illuminate struggles over ecologies and environments and reveal the power of outsider imaginations in shaping change. Over the last decade, I have enjoyed the privilege of spending many hours studying the Octavia E. Butler Papers at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California. When the great science fiction writer died much too young in 2006, she left behind a vast amount of material, including newspaper clippings, story and novel drafts, letters, diaries, and journals, that curator Natalie Russell, following Butler's own organizational logic  whenever possible, arranged in more than 350 boxes . Calling herself a Histo-Futurist who extrapolates from the past and present to imagine the future, Butler drew on this material in crafting her fiction. I suggest that the papers themselves are an important form of memory work. 

I have participated in several Public Humanities projects focused on Butler's memory. I held a 2015 Huntington fellowship and in 2016 co-organized with Ayana Jamieson a major three-day conference at UCSD called "Shaping Change: Remembering Octavia E. Butler through Archives, Art, and World-Making." Currently Jamieson and I are planning a 2026 sequel to this conference at UCSD. I also delivered a keynote at the June 2017 Huntington conference, "Octavia E. Butler Studies: Convergence of an Expanding Field," co-organized by Jamieson and Moya Bailey and participated in the year-long series of events that took place in in Butler's memory in Los Angeles in 2016-2017 called "Radio Imagination: Artists and Writers in the Archive of Octavia E. Butler," organized by arts collective Clockshop's Director Julia Meltzer. More recently, I served as an advisor for the San Diego New Children’s Museum exhibit Octavia E. Butler: Seeding Futures, the first of its kind long-term youth-focused exhibit on the life and work of the great science fiction writer.

I also co-edited Keywords for Comics Studies (2021) for NYU Press with Ramzi Fawaz and Deborah Whaley. That book won a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title award. I was co-convener of a UCSD Humanities Center Working Group in Comics Studies and presented with Pepe Rojo and Jeanine Webb at the Comics Arts Conference as part of San Diego Comic-Con. Below is a Peanuts comic that Octavia E. Butler kept, from a friend she met at the 1971 Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers workshop, Russell Bates, a Kiowa man from Oklahoma who wrote an episode for Star Trek the Animated Series (1973) that included the first Native American character to serve in Starfleet. I write about Butler’s and Bates’ friendship and letters in Imagining the Future of Climate Change.

Over the last decade, I have been honored to be lead PI on two large Speculative Futures grants that have allowed me to help advance efforts at UCSD to establish Speculative Futures Studies as an interdivisional project shared by the Ethnic Studies and Literature Departments spanning the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities Divisions at UCSD. This research is rooted in the interdivisional, interdisciplinary work of all the many scholars, students, and staff who have participated in our activities and events over the years.

First was a University of California Multi-Campus Research Initiative grant (2019-2023) to support “Speculative Futures.” We believed that although dystopian visions of a ruined planet and disastrous future are found everywhere in popular culture, literature, art and theory can help create more sustainable and equitable worlds. Building on the premise that in order to create a better world, we first have to imagine it, we envisioned building a cross-UC research group involving faculty, graduate students, undergraduates and community members who use speculative cultural forms and theories to conduct collaborative research on the future of education, ecology, gender, sexuality, race, and addressing inequalities in California and the world. Our researchers focused on four broad areas: (1) Ecology and Climate Change, (2) The Future of Schooling and Education, (3) Transnational Divisions and Connections, and (4) Race, Labor, and Artificial Intelligence, in part foregrounding the histories, ideas, scientific practices and futures envisioned by people of color, women and Indigenous people. Initially centering on UC San Diego (host), UC Riverside (Nalo Hopkinson, Englsh/Writing), UC Irvine (Christopher Fan, English) and UC Santa Cruz (Neda Atanasoski, Feminist Studies), the group served as a platform for system-wide collaboration among faculty, students and the community who aspire to create and build sustainable, non-dystopian futures. See https://today.ucsd.edu/story/uc-san-diego-researchers-receive-funding-to-address-critical-issues-facing-california.

Second was a Mellon Foundation grant for “Speculative Environmental Futures” (2023-present) a project I created with co-Pis Joo Ok Kim from UCSD’s Literature Department/Arts and Humanities Division and Christopher Perreira from the Ethnic Studies Department/Social Sciences Division. Since I hold a trans-divisional joint appointment in Literature and Ethnic Studies at UCSD, we were well-poised to lead efforts to cross disciplinary and divisional boundaries and counter efforts to silo these discussions in ways that risk draining them of their history and potential. We partnered with the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network, the Environmental Health Coalition, and the New Children’s Museum of San Diego, among others, to co-create numerous events, happenings, reading groups, and new courses at UCSD in the Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities divisions. We have been most happy to be able to award hundreds of thousands of dollars in fellowships to support PhD students in the Literature and Ethnic Studies Departments at various stages of their research and dissertation-writing journeys. Our work is ongoing and moving forward with a recent, May 2026 conference “Seeding Futures Now!” at UCSD and the New Children’s Museum of San Diego that brought together dozens of artists, writers, scholars, and students to think together about how the work of the great science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler helps us confront the ecological and environmental present and see and seed new and better futures. See https://www.seedingfuturesnow.com.