Jamieson said Butler’s work is brilliant because of the writer’s extensive research that is also informed by her lived experiences. “Many Black women and non-binary folks leading the way and making space for themselves through community, and I think that’s part of what Butler’s characters do in many ways.”īutler’s work is prescient in the way it describes the impact of climate change and dystopian apocalypses. There are other Black women-owned bookstores throughout Los Angeles including the Salt Eaters in Inglewood and Reparations Club in Crenshaw. “This work isn’t happening in a vacuum,” she said of High’s new bookstore. She says that movies like Black Panther which spotlight Black speculative fiction and Afrofuturism prove that audiences are hungry for narratives that center and empower Black characters. About 90% of its students are people of color.ĭr Ayana AH Jamieson, an assistant professor of ethnic studies at Cal Poly Pomona, is the founder of the Octavia E Butler Legacy Network, an organization that preserves the work of and promotes scholarship on the writer. Just last fall her middle school alma mater, the Washington Steam multilingual academy, was renamed the Octavia E Butler magnet school, making it the first school in the nation to honor her legacy by name. Today, her journals and writings are kept in an archive at the nearby Huntington library in San Marino, where members of the public can view them. These writings informed her bestselling series Earthseed, which is set in the apocalyptic, drought-stricken year of 2027 in Los Angeles. She meticulously kept a record of her surroundings and noted her observations of the natural world and the growing crisis of climate change. I wanted my bookstore to be completely independent so that I would not have to compromise my values Nikki Highīutler was born and raised in Pasadena, and attended local schools including Pasadena City College, where she began her career as a writer. In 2020, Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower landed on the New York Times bestseller list, and adaptations such as the limited series Kindred on Hulu have brought her work to TV screens. Octavia’s Bookshelf is just one of many recent iterations of Butler’s powerful legacy that is casting renewed interest in the author’s work. “I wanted to be completely independent so that I would not have to compromise my values,” she said. But now that her crowdfunded shop has opened, it’s allowed her to enjoy a level of freedom she wouldn’t have had otherwise. High said that without the donations it would have been harder to raise the necessary capital to open the bookstore. With over 10,000 retweets and 5.1m views, it garnered a flood of support and donations toward her new venture that raised more than $22,000 on GoFundMe. On New Year’s Eve 2022, she wrote a tweet about her efforts to start Octavia’s Bookshelf and it instantly went viral online. High had been relying on her own savings and was looking to take out a loan until everything changed overnight. View image in fullscreen The interior of Octavia’s Bookshelf in Pasadena, California. ‘Yes, I could do this.’ So when I came home, I just started to look at different retail spaces,” she said. And she was impressed by the business models carved out by existing Black women-owned bookstores like the Lit Bar in the Bronx. In August, she visited a collective of female artisans in Swaziland, Africa, and witnessed the community care embedded in their daily lives. She searched for examples of what her storefront could be. High took the leap a few months later in October of that year and began the process of starting her own business. “I had been thinking about for about 10 years, but not in a way where I was ready to leave my job and do it,” said High, who managed communications for 15 years at Trader Joe’s.īut what pushed High to lean into her dream was the May 2022 death of her grandmother, who had always championed her granddaughter’s pursuits. Beyond books, Octavia’s Bookshelf has everything from quirky book-nerd socks to prayer candles dedicated to iconic Black women literary figures such as Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde. Inside Octavia’s Bookshelf is a carefully curated set of books and non-book items that High has sourced from mainly independent Bipoc-owned businesses – “not on Amazon”, she emphatically said. Now that she’s 48, High’s love of Butler’s work has manifested into a physical store that represents the writer’s legacy. High first encountered Butler’s work as a young person in high school reading Kindred, which was originally published in 1979. High wanted her bookstore to reflect the values of Butler’s writings and to specialize in selling the work of writers of color. Her store, Octavia’s Bookshelf, Pasadena’s first and only Black-owned bookstore, was inspired by the speculative-fiction writer Octavia E Butler, who spent her life and career in the city.
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