Butler tee

Octavia Estelle Butler (1947 – 2006) was an American science fiction author, a multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula awards, and a pioneer of Afrofuturism. In 1995, Butler became the first science-fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship.

Born in Pasadena, California, Butler was raised by her widowed mother. Extremely shy as a child, Butler found an outlet at the library reading fantasy, and in writing. She began writing science fiction as a teenager and attended community college during the time of the Black Power movement.

During the Open Door Workshop of the Writers Guild of America West, a program designed to mentor minority writers, her writing impressed one of the teachers, noted science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison. He encouraged her to attend the six-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania. There, Butler met the writer Samuel R. Delany, who became a longtime friend.

For the next five years, Butler worked on the series of novels that later became known as the Patternist series. In 1978, she was finally able to stop working at temporary jobs and live on her writing.

Butler's rise to prominence began in 1984 when "Speech Sounds" won the Hugo Award for Short Story and, a year later, Bloodchild won the Hugo Award, the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette. In the meantime, Butler traveled to the Amazon rainforest and the Andes to do research for what would become the Xenogenesis trilogy (republished in 2000 as the collection Lilith's Brood). During the 1990s, Butler worked on the novels that solidified her fame as a writer: Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998).

Butler claimed to have three loyal audiences: black readers, science-fiction fans, and feminists. She died of a stroke at the age of 58. Her papers are held in the research collection of the Huntington Library.

• 100% combed and ring-spun cotton (Heather colors contain polyester)
• Fabric weight: 4.2 oz/yd² (142 g/m²)
• Pre-shrunk fabric
• Side-seamed construction
• Shoulder-to-shoulder taping
• Blank product sourced from Guatemala, Nicaragua, Mexico, Honduras, or the US

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