![]() At twelve, she watched the televised version of the film, Devil Girl from Mars, and was convinced she could write a better story. Butler Memorial Scholarship was established by the Carl Brandon Society to provide support to students of color to attend the Clarion Writers Workshop where Butler got her start decades years before.īutler began writing stories as a child and soon turned to science fiction. Butler sold her first two stories at the workshop. Butler’s mother gave Butler the money she had been saving for dental work to pay the rest of the fee. He encouraged Butler to attend the 6-week Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania and contributed $100 towards her application fee. Butler became a protégée of the renowned science fiction writer, Harlan Ellison. Later, a well-intentioned aunt told her, “Honey … Negroes can’t be writers.”īutler earned an Associate’s degree from Pasadena City College in 1968, and later studied at California State University, Los Angeles. ![]() Butler recalled her mother remarking that one day she might become a writer, causing Butler her to realize for the first time that it was possible to make a living as an author. Butler’s mother also encouraged her to write and bought her daughter her first typewriter when she was ten years old. Her mother would bring home the discarded books of the white families she worked for. Despite having mild dyslexia, she found escape in books. Butler would accompany her mother to her cleaning work and recalled her mother entering white people’s houses through back doors.īutler was conspicuously tall for her age and painfully shy. ![]() Her father, a shoeshine man, died when she was seven. Her difficult life prepared her to write about struggling to survive in hostile dystopias. Butler was one of the first African-American science fiction writers, and one of the first women to break the science fiction gender barrier.īutler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. ![]()
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