Join us as we discuss books that make you want to think, explore, and connect. Uniting literature and visual art, we’ll come together for an engaging conversation that will expand our experience of the book as well as our current exhibition, When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes.
Book Discussion of Dawn by Octavia Butler
April 29, 7pm
“Octavia Butler’s fantastical and psychologically complicated myth[s] fueled my desire to tell a story. As a visual artist, I knew it would not only be told through words but through a physicalization of objects, places, and by building new realities.”
– Saya Woolfalk, artist in When Evening Has Passed and Tomorrow Comes
About Dawn:
When Lilith lyapo wakes from a centuries-long sleep, she finds herself aboard the vast spaceship of the Oankali. She discovers that the Oankali—a seemingly benevolent alien race—intervened in the fate of humanity hundreds of years ago, saving everyone who survived a nuclear war from a dying, ruined Earth and then putting them into a deep sleep. After learning all they could about Earth and its beings, the Oankali healed the planet, cured cancer, increased human strength, and they now want Lilith to lead her people back to Earth—but salvation comes at a price.
Hopeful and thought-provoking, this post-apocalyptic narrative deftly explores gender and race through the eyes of characters struggling to adapt during a pivotal time of crisis and change.
Discussion led by Elizabeth Callaway
Elizabeth Callaway is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Utah and affiliated faculty with the Environmental Humanities Graduate Program. Her research sits at the intersections of environmental humanities, digital humanities, and new media studies. Her book, Eden’s Endemics: Narratives of Biodiversity on Earth and Beyond reexamines biodiversity, paying attention to the narratives, genres, and tropes that are drawn upon in representations of biodiversity and reveals that biodiversity is as much a matter of stories as of species. In addition, she works on various collaborative projects with digital humanists, biologists, and social scientists on biodiversity, climate change, and forests. Dr. Callaway completed her PhD in English at the University of California Santa Barbara and her undergraduate degree in English Literature and Biological Sciences at Stanford University.
This program has received funding from Utah Humanities (UH). UH empowers Utahns to improve their communities through active engagement in the humanities.