Growing Up Girl

Going from a shy Black girl, born in 1947 and raised under Jim Crow, to a literary icon, Octavia E. Butler’s path to success was not linear. She was told not to dream but to get a “real” job. As she juggled temp jobs, financial anxiety and a society that resisted making room for her, Butler wrote genre-defining literature that has been adapted for TV and film in recent years, and has continued to go viral nearly two decades after her death in 2006 at 58.

In “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler,” author and college professor Susana M. Morris shares the quiet yet radical story of Butler’s life, revealing how the worlds she imagined were shaped by the one that often shut her out.

Butler’s fiction never floated away from reality. It confronted it. And it continues to make readers question what they thought they understood.

On social media, the “ ” trend captures the ominous ways her words resonate in the present on issues like climate change, inequality and politics. Her ability, decades ago, to conjure how we live now gives Morris’ students a feeling of connection to Butler’s work today.

Read more: nbcnews.app.link/WMQtVHBPKVb

I voted.