Source: The Center For Black Literature / The Center For Black Literature
The Center For Black Literature will focus on the success of Black authors in speculative fiction for this year’s national convention to be held later this month in Brooklyn, New York.
For those fans of Black literature and the tradition of speculative fiction, the upcoming 2023 National Black Writers Conference Biennial Symposium will satisfy their desires. The conference, organized by the Center for Black Literature at Medgar Evers College in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York will be held beginning next Friday (March 31st) and Saturday (April 1st) at the academic institution. The theme of the event this year is Diasporic Visions: Celebrating Black Speculative Fiction.
In accordance with the theme, the three panels slated for the conference will hone in on the various factors of speculative fiction and Afrofuturism employed by Black authors across the diaspora. There will be a slew of notable writers who are attending, which include Tananarive Due, Jewelle Gomez, Tim Fielders, and Christine Taylor-Butler among others. The penultimate event of the conference will be the NBWC Honorees Spotlight, which will be a conversation between authors and the honorees for 2023, Sheree Renée Thomas and Jewell Parker Rhodes. Both women will receive the Octavia E. Butler Award, named after the award-winning late author and pioneer of the genre.
The conference will also feature a selection of other events to take place before the symposium, aimed at students interested in writing speculative fiction from the primary school level to the high school level. Booksellers will also be in attendance on-site and virtually throughout the conference.
The NBWC was first founded by the literary giant John Oliver Killens in 1986 at the City University of New York school and has been held on the last weekend in March since its inception. From that point, it has become a well-regarded event for emerging Black writers and those of note, spanning all generations.
For more information on tickets for the conference, you can check out their website here.
