Professor Isiah Lavender III will give the keynote speech at the International Conference on The Possible and Impossible Worlds of Science Fiction, which is being held September 11-12, 2020. Non-presenting audience members are welcome to attend this online conference for free.
Dr. Lavender is the author of four books, five book chapters, eleven peer-reviewed articles and essays, two review essays, fifteen published book reviews, and three encyclopedia entries. In 2018 he joined the editorial team of the oldest science fiction journal, Extrapolation, and is currently overseeing and co-editing the “Beyond Afrofuturism” special double issue of the journal. His impending fourth book, Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement (Ohio State UP, October 2019) extends existing scholarly conversations about afrofuturism to canonical literary texts by African American writers (most from before the twentieth century) that up to now have not traditionally been thought of as SF.