Octavia Estelle Butler (1947-2006), often referred to as the "grand dame of science fiction," was born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947. She received an Associate of Arts degree in 1968 from Pasadena City College and also attended California State University in Los Angeles and the University of California, Los Angeles. Butler was the first science-fiction writer to win a MacArthur Fellowship ("genius" grant). She won the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award and the Nebula and Hugo Awards, among others.
John Jennings is the curator of the Megascope list and illustrator of the graphic novel adaptations of Octavia E. Butler's
Kindred and
Parable of the Sower. He is a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, and was awarded the Nasir Jones Hiphop Fellowship at Harvard's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. He also co-edited the Eisner Award-winning anthology
The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art.
Damian Duffy, cartoonist, writer, and comics letterer, is a PhD student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, and a founder of Eye Trauma Studios (eyetrauma.net). His first published graphic novel,
The Hole: Consumer Culture, created with artist John Jennings, was released by Front 40 Press in 2008. Along with Jennings, Duffy has curated several comics art shows, including
Other Heroes: African American Comic Book Creators, Characters and Archetypes and
Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics, and published the art book
Black Comix: African American Independent Comics Art and Culture. He has also published scholarly essays in comics form on curation, new media, diversity, and critical pedagogy.
