Representation and (Re)Writing Speculative Fiction

Writing & Literacies On Air

Welcome to the Writing & Literacies SIG new podcast series "Scholarship Spotlight"! This episode, titled “Representation and (Re)Writing Speculative Fiction,” is an interview with Professor Tananarive Due and Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas about their histories and critical involvement with(re)writing the genre of speculative fiction. In Part I of this two part series, they answer the questions: How does your work rethink or resist the conventions of speculative fiction? What conventions of speculative fiction need to be reworked, and how are you as scholars challenging these conventions in similar (or different) ways? Tananarive Due is is an award-winning author who teaches Black Horror and Afrofuturism at UCLA. She is an executive producer on Shudder's groundbreaking documentary Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror. She and her husband/collaborator Steven Barnes wrote "A Small Town" for Season 2 of "The Twilight Zone" on CBS All Access. A leading voice in black speculative fiction for more than 20 years, Due has won an American Book Award, an NAACP Image Award, and a British Fantasy Award, and her writing has been included in best-of-the-year anthologies. Her books include Ghost Summer: Stories, My Soul to Keep, and The Good House. She and her late mother, civil rights activist Patricia Stephens Due, co-authored Freedom in the Family: a Mother-Daughter Memoir of the Fight for Civil Rights. Dr. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas, Associate Professor at Penn GSE, studies how people of color are portrayed, or not portrayed, in children’s and young adult literature, and how those portrayals shape our culture. She regularly reviews children’s books featuring diverse heroes and heroines, teens and tweens caught between cultures, and kids from the margins for the Los Angeles Times. She has a particular interest in young adult fantasy literature and fan culture. A former English and language arts teacher, Thomas also explores how teachers handle traumatic historical events, such as slavery, when teaching literature. Dr. Thomas has published her research and critical work in the Journal of Teacher Education, Research in the Teaching of English, Qualitative Inquiry, Linguistics and Education, English Journal, The ALAN Review, and Sankofa: A Journal of African Children’s and Young Adult Literature. Her work has also appeared in Diversity in Youth Literature: Opening Doors Through Reading (ALA Editions, 2012), her co-edited volume Reading African American Experiences in the Obama Era: Theory, Advocacy, Activism (Peter Lang, 2012), and A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (University of Illinois Press, 2009). Dr. Thomas is a former NCTE Cultivating New Voices Among Scholars of Color Fellow (2008-2010 Cohort), serves on the NCTE Standing Committee on Research (2012-2015), and was elected by her colleagues to serve on the NCTE Conference on English Education's Executive Committee (2013-2017). Her early career work received the 2014 Emerging Scholar Award from AERA's Language and Social Processes Special Interest Group. In 2014, she was also selected as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow. This Scholarship Spotlight Series is brought to you by the The W&L Graduate Board Podcast Team: Karis Jones at New York University, Alex Corbitt at Boston College, Gemma Cooper-Novack at Syracuse University, Jessica Lough at West Virginia University and April Camping at Arizona State University. Special thanks to Alex Corbitt for his thought leadership and video editing work on this episode!