Writing Future Worlds: An Afternoon with adrienne maree brown & Dani McClain

The Weston Art Gallery and the Mercantile Library are pleased to host New York Times-bestselling author adrienne maree brown on Saturday, April 26th at 2p for “Writing Future Worlds.” This exploration of visionary storytelling will feature brown in conversation with local journalist and author Dani McClain. The longtime collaborators will come together on the tenth anniversary of the publication of Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements, an anthology co-edited by brown that includes McClain’s short story “Homing Instinct.”

Brown is among those committed to ensuring that celebrated speculative fiction author Octavia Butler’s legacy endures well beyond her 2006 death. Brown cohosted with musician Toshi Reagon the podcast Octavia’s Parables, which interrogates Butler’s classic texts and finds lessons that apply to our contemporary tumultuous times. Along with her sister Autumn Brown, she cohosts the podcast How to Survive the End of the World, inspired by Butler’s model of preparing ourselves for apocalyptic changes. She is also the author of the Grievers speculative fiction trilogy set in Detroit. Book three, Ancestors, publishes in June of this year. American Book Award winner Tananarive Due has called brown “one of our most important voices in Afrofuturism and true-life worldbuilding.”

Brown’s Cincinnati visit coincides with the opening of Homing Instinct: Letting Go of the Shore at the Weston Art Gallery (April 25 - June 8). Filmmaker Lydia Dean Pilcher's multi-screen cinematic installation was inspired by McClain’s Octavia’s Brood story.

2 pm program
Free & open to the public. Registration required.

Copies of Adrienne & Dani’s books will be available for sale & signing courtesy of Downbound Books.

About adrienne maree brown & Dani McClain

adrienne maree brown (she/they) is growing a garden of healing ideas. Informed by decades of movement facilitation, somatics, science fiction scholarship and doula work, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Loving Correction as ideas and practices for transformation. adrienne is the NYT-bestselling author/editor of several published texts, a ritual singer-songwriter, co-generator of the Lineages of Change Tarot Deck, and co-creator/host of How to Survive the End of the World podcast with Autumn Brown. adrienne’s latest book Loving Corrections is now available from AK Press.

Dani McClain is a Spencer Journalism Fellow reporting on education and mental health. She has written about play therapy and Black families’ experiences of the pandemic for The New York Times, the complicated legacy of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger for Harper’s BAZAAR, and how to talk to kids about racism and policing for The Atlantic. McClain is a contributing writer at The Nation and was a staff reporter at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She received a James Aronson Award for her coverage of the maternal health crisis. Her book We Live for the We: The Political Power of Black Motherhood was published in 2019 by Bold Type Books and was shortlisted in 2020 for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. McClain was the Cincinnati public library's Writer-in-Residence in 2020 and 2021.