Writers Tisa Bryant, Lynell George, Robin Coste Lewis, and Fred Moten will premiere new works of poetry and creative nonfiction commissioned for Radio Imagination.

For these commissions, each writer spent an extended period of time working in the Octavia E. Butler archive at The Huntington Library. A Q&A with the writers will follow.

This event is part of Clockshop’s Radio Imagination, a series of programs and artist commissions exploring the legacy of Octavia E. Butler.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of essays on myth-making and black presences in film, literature, and visual art, and co-editor and publisher of The Encyclopedia Project. War Diaries, an anthology she edited for AIDS Project Los Angeles was nominated for a 2010 Lambda Literary Award. Her work has appeared in Mandorla and in Letters to the Future: An Anthology of Experimental Writing by Black Women (Kore Press, forthcoming), among other publications, and she is currently working on a novel, The Curator. Bryant teaches in the MFA Creative Writing Program at the CalArts.

Lynell George is a Los Angeles-based journalist and essayist. As a staff writer at the Los Angeles Times and L.A. Weekly she covered social issues, art, human behavior, and identity politics. She is currently an arts and culture columnist for KCET’s Artbound. George’s writing has appeared in various magazines and news outlets, including Boom, Slake, Vibe, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Essence, Black Clock, The Root, Ms., and many others, and she is the author of No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso, 1992), a collection of essays drawn from her reporting. She is currently a Los Angeles Institute for the Humanities Fellow.

Robin Coste Lewis‘ Voyage of the Sable Venus (Knopf, 2015) won the 2015 National Book Award in Poetry. She is a Provost’s Fellow at the University of Southern California. A Cave Canem Fellow, she was a finalist for the National Rita Dove Prize in 2004. She graduated from Harvard Divinity School, where she received a Master of Theological Studies degree in Sanskrit and comparative religious literature. Lewis has been awarded residencies and fellowships by the Caldera Foundation, Ragdale Foundation, Headlands Center for the Arts, Can Serrat International Art Centre in Barcelona, and the Summer Literary Seminars in Kenya.

Fred Moten is the author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), Hughson’s Tavern (Leon Works, 2008), B. Jenkins (Duke University Press, 2010), The Feel Trio (Letter Machine Editions, 2014), The Little Edges (Wesleyan University Press, 2015) and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions/Autonomedia, 2013). Two new books will appear in 2016: consent not to be a single being: Essays 2002-2015 (Duke University Press) and The Service Porch (Letter Machine Editions). Moten teaches literature and critical theory at the University of California, Riverside.

Source Photo: Clockshop, Octavia E. Butler Papers, The Huntington