Dreaming of new worlds: Stephanie Toliver celebrates Black women in science fiction and fantasy

By Daniel Strain via https://www.colorado.edu/

Stephanie Toliver was a college student studying English education Tallahassee, Florida, when she discovered a book that changed her life.

The novel was Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. Published in 1993, the science fiction story follows a young “hyper-empath” named Lauren Olamina as she travels across a futuristic California ravaged by poverty and white supremacist gangs.

By that point, Toliver was already an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy. She’d spent much of her childhood devouring books in the Animorphs and The Hero and the Crown series. But Parable of the Sower was something new. In a genre dominated by white men, the book stood out for having a main character who, like Butler and Toliver herself, was a Black woman. 

“I called home, and I said, ‘Oh my god, there’s this new author who does such cool work,’” said Toliver, who’s now an assistant professor in the School of Education at CU Boulder. “Then I looked at the copyright and realized that it was from the 90s. I had to sit with myself for a minute to think about why I didn’t know that it existed.”

Today, the scholar has dedicated much of her career to celebrating and sharing the existence of Black women in…

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