What happens when Black writers refuse the limits of this world?
Award winning Black sci-fi and fantasy author Cerece Murphy joins Books & Bounty’s founder Stephanie Henderson for a conversation about Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, and the liberating possibilities of imagining Black people in strange places—across distant planets, alternate histories, transformed futures, and worlds that have yet to exist.
Together, we’ll explore the themes and storytelling mechanisms that make speculative fiction particularly powerful for Black storytelling: reimagining history, disrupting systems of power, reclaiming mythology and ancestry, and building worlds where marginalized people can exist beyond the boundaries imposed upon them. We’ll also consider why these imaginative spaces hold particular possibilities for Black women—writers and characters who have long been asked to navigate worlds in which they were treated as the “other.”
This is a conversation about worldbuilding, yes—but also about who gets to imagine, who gets to belong, and what becomes possible when Black folk build the world themselves.
