Memory Librarian and Other Stories

10:00 am - 10:50 am
| Location of Session: SABF Virtual Tent
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: N/A
| Signing Location: N/A

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About the Event

In The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, worldwide superstar Janelle Monáe and an esteemed cohort of collaborating writers bring to the written page the Afrofuturistic world of her critically acclaimed album, Dirty Computer. These stories explore how different threads of liberation — queerness, race, gender plurality, and love—become tangled with future possibilities of memory and time in such a totalitarian landscape and what the costs might be when trying to unravel and weave them into freedoms. Alaya Dawn Johnson, Yohanca Delgado, Dr. Eve L. Ewing, Danny Lore, and Sheree Reneé Thomas read excerpts from their stories and reveal how self-identity, love, space, A.I., and time instruct these narratives.

This is a pre-recorded session. The authors will not be present on Saturday, May 21, and there will be no book signing.

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About the Authors

Yohanca Delgado

Yohanca Delgado was born in New York to parents from Cuba and the Dominican Republic. Her recent writing appears in The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2021, The Paris Review, New York Times Magazine, and TIME magazine. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from American University and is a graduate of the Clarion workshop for writers of speculative fiction. She is a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts grant recipient and a Wallace Stegner fellow at Stanford University.

Photo Credit: Nolis Anderson

Dr. Eve L. Ewing

Eve L. Ewing is the award-winning author of the poetry collections Electric Arches and 1919, the nonfiction work Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, and the novel for young readers Maya and the Robot as well as several projects for Marvel Comics, most notably the Ironheart series. She is the co-author (with Nate Marshall) of the play No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks.

Alaya Dawn Johnson

Alaya Dawn Johnson is a Nebula award-winning short story writer and the author of seven novels for adults and young adults. Her most recent adult novel, Trouble the Saints, won the 2021 World Fantasy Award for best novel. Her debut YA novel, The Summer Prince, was longlisted for the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, and the follow-up, Love Is the Drug, was awarded the Andre Norton/Nebula Award. Her short stories have appeared in many magazines and anthologies, including Asimov’s, F&SF and A Phoenix First Must Burn. She lives in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Danny Lore

Danny Lore is a queer Black writer and editor raised in Harlem and currently based in the Bronx. They’ve had their short fiction published by FIYAH, Podcastle, Fireside, Nightlight, EFNIKS.com and more. They’re also included in A Phoenix First Must Burn (Viking Children’s, 2020) and Janelle Monae’s The Memory Librarian (Harper Voyager, 2022). They’ve written the comics Queen of Bad Dreams (Vault, 2019), Quarter Killer (Comixology, 2020), and most recently Lunar Room (Vault, 2021). Their next creator-owned project is the middle-grade graphic novel Kicks (Scholastic, 2024) to be illustrated by Seth S. Smith.

Janelle Monae

Janelle Monáe is widely celebrated as an American singer/songwriter, actress, producer, fashion icon, and futurist whose globally successful career spans over a decade. With her highly theatrical and stylized concept albums, she has garnered eight Grammy nominations and has developed her own label imprint, Wondaland Arts Society. Monáe has also earned great success as an actor, starring in critically acclaimed films including Moonlight, Hidden Figures, Harriet, The Glorias, and the 2020 horror film Antebellum. She will star in the highly anticipated sequel Knives Out 2. The Memory Librarian is her debut book.

Sheree Reneé Thomas

Sheree Renée Thomas is an award-winning author, editor, and poet whose work is inspired by music, natural science, and mythology. Her fiction collection, Nine Bar Blues: Stories from an Ancient Future, was a Finalist for the 2021 Ignyte, Locus, and World Fantasy Awards. She is the author of Marvel’s Panther’s Rage novel (forthcoming August 31, 2022), a contributor to Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda, and a collaborator with Janelle Monáe on The Memory Librarian and Other Stories of Dirty Computer. She is the editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, associate editor of Obsidian, and also edited the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning groundbreaking anthologies, Dark Matter: A Century of Speculative Fiction from the African Diaspora and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (Grand Central). A 2022 winner of the Dal Coger Memorial Hall of Fame Award, she lives in Memphis, Tennessee near a mighty river and a pyramid.

Moderator

Lille Allen

Lille Allen is a Latinx designer and photographer based in Las Vegas, NV. She serves as the San Antonio Book Festival Communications Director. Previously, she was the Associate Art Director for the arts and culture magazine The Believer.