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.