OCTAVIA E. BUTLER

Shori is a mystery. Found alone in the woods, she appears to be a little black girl with traumatic amnesia and near-fatal wounds. But Shori is a fifty-three-year-old vampire with a ravenous hunger for blood, the lost child of an ancient species of near-immortals who live in dark symbiosis with humanity. Genetically modified to be able to walk in daylight, Shori now becomes the target of a vast plot to destroy her and her kind. And in the final apocalyptic battle, her survival will depend on whether all humans are bigots--or all bigots are human.









Kindred

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Dana, a modern black woman, is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back again and again for Rufus, yet each time the stay grows longer and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana's life will end, long before it has even begun.

More Books by Octavia E. Butler

• Seed to Harvest
• Bloodchild: And Other Stories
• Lilith's Brood
• Parable of the Sower

About Octavia Butler
22 June 1947 - 24 February 2006

Butler was born and raised in Pasadena, California. Since her father Laurice, a shoeshiner, died when she was a baby, Butler was raised by her grandmother and her mother (Octavia M. Butler) who worked as a maid in order to support the family. Butler grew up in a struggling, racially mixed neighborhood. According to the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, Butler was "an introspective only child in a strict Baptist household" and "was drawn early to magazines such as Amazing, Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Galaxy and soon began reading all the science fiction classics."

Octavia Jr., nicknamed Junie, was paralytically shy and a daydreamer, and was later diagnosed as being dyslexic. She began writing at the age of 10 "to escape loneliness and boredom"; she was 12 when she began a lifelong interest in science fiction. "I was writing my own little stories and when I was 12, I was watching a bad science fiction movie called Devil Girl from Mars", she told the journal Black Scholar, "and decided that I could write a better story than that. And I turned off the TV and proceeded to try, and I've been writing science fiction ever since."

After getting an associate degree from Pasadena City College in 1968, she next enrolled at California State University, Los Angeles. She eventually left CalState and took writing classes through UCLA extension.

Butler would later credit two writing workshops for giving her "the most valuable help I received with my writing":

• 1969–1970: The Open Door Workshop of the Screenwriters' Guild of America, West, a program designed to mentor Latino and African American writers. Through Open Door she met the noted science fiction writer Harlan Ellison.
• 1970: The Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop, (introduced to her by Ellison), where she first met Samuel R. Delany.

Butler moved to Seattle, Washington, in November 1999.

She described herself as "comfortably asocial—a hermit in the middle of Seattle—a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black, a former Baptist, an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive." Themes of both racial and sexual ambiguity are apparent throughout her work.

She died outside of her home in Lake Forest Park, Washington, on February 24, 2006, at the age of 58. Some news accounts have stated that she died of head injuries after falling and striking her head on her walkway, while others report that she apparently suffered a stroke as a result of those injuries.