Reading Groups

Octavia Butler: Traveling Through Time and Space with Maia Butler

3 Sessions Tuesdays, 6:30 pm EDT - 8:00 pm EDT August 5 to September 23, 2025

Online via Zoom

featured-images.reading-groups.202505064

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at a 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
8/5, 9/2, 9/23

Online via Zoom

In this reading group, we will engage with three novels by acclaimed speculative fiction writer Octavia Butler, whose works traverse the literary landscapes of science fiction and Afrofuturism. Her protagonists in the novels Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998), and Fledgling (2005) are on the move. They move across place, jump across time, and they navigate socially constructed borders around concepts such as race, gender, and species. What enduring lessons do Octavia Butler’s stories hold for us about who we are in our bodies, who we are in place and time, and who we are in communities impacted by human- made systems that are antithetical to humanity’s survival on a planetary scale?

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read Parable of the Sower in advance of the first meeting.

What to expect from this reading group: Each of these texts is a juicy read in its own way, so I’ll bring questions to the group reading circle to get us going, and participants should feel welcome to do the same. I hope that these questions will lead to an organic exchange of ideas, as our collective meaning-making will become richer when everyone brings what they know into the circle. I also look forward to sharing important concepts in literary studies that will shift the way you encounter, engage with, and understand the work of Black women writers. I hope that participants will enjoy discussion questions that lead to organic exchange, as our meaning-making becomes richer when all participants bring what they know into the circle.

Reading List:

Session I: Parable of the Sower
Session II: Parable of the Talents
Session III: Fledgling

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler

Maia L. Butler (she/her/s) is Associate Professor of African American Literature at UNC Wilmington. She is a literary geographer centering Black women writers within African Diasporic and Anglophone Postcolonial studies. She co-founded the Edwidge Danticat Society, co-edited the award-winning collection Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (University Press of Mississippi, 2022), and is at work on her first monograph Floating Homelands: Postnational Constructions of Home by Black Women and Nonbinary Writers, which has been supported by a Mellon fellowship in Democracy and Landscape Studies, hosted by Dumbarton Oaks, a Harvard trustee.

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops