We're not necessarily resolutions people but we can always get behind setting a goal to read more books. If that's something you're aiming to do in 2024, we encourage you to check out our neighborhood bookstore, LOVING ROOM: Diaspora Books + Salon, which is running a BLACK FUTURIST BOOK CLUB.
Beginning this past October, Reading Our Futures: A Black Futurist Book Club, meets on the fourth Monday of every month at 6 PM. Meetings are hosted by Brooke Bosley, who holds a Ph.D. in Digital Media, specializing in Black Media, from the Georgia Institute of Technology and wrote her dissertation on the intersection of Human-Computer Interaction, Afrofuturism, Black Feminism, and Race & Technology. Each month the group devotes attention to a selected title from within the vast categories of Black futurist literature, centering the works of foundational authors such as Octavia E. Butler and Samuel Delany, alongside contemporary writers including N.K. Jemisin and Tomi Adeyemi. Not to worry, you don't need to have been a book club member from the jump, you can read and join gatherings as able.
Black futurist literary lieux compel us to engage in generative dialogue and reflection about the substance of our living as Black folks-- to dream our futures, in light of the complexities of our pasts and present. We highlight and even venerate the ancestral, as we grieve the layers of suffering that have been inflicted-- the dystopias of Diaspora dealings-- and imagine futures unfettered. We consider the possibilities, implications, and ethical considerations of modern technologies and trends in design. Literally, and literarily, what do our (liberated) Black futures comprise?
LOVING ROOM also hosts a mid-point virtual meeting every month for folks who are interested in having a check-in before the monthly meeting. The virtual option is also available for folks who are not located in Seattle or otherwise unable to attend the in-person book club meetings month to month.
And of course, we encourage you to stop into LOVING ROOM to purchase your book in person, or through their online shop on bookshop.org.
UPCOMING BOOKS:
February 26th - The Comet, W.E.B DuBois (& other short stories to be announced)
March 25th - The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer by Janelle Monáe
You can learn more about the Black Futurist Book Club as well as RSVP and register directly for Zoom sessions on their Eventbrite page.
