On Black Feminist Worldmaking

A Conversation with N.K. Jemisin, 'Pemi Aguda, and Yvette Ndlovu

This year's theme for the Newhouse Center is Radical Futures. We are particularly interested in exploring and celebrating work that centers Black, feminist worldmaking. We aim to showcase research, writing, and creations that explore the rich intersection between the Humanities and STEM fields, and highlight the way that humanistic reasoning, perspectives, and methods help to show us how to build the kind of world(s) we want to live in.

N.K. Jemisin is the first author in the genre's history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, for her Broken Earth triology; her novels have sold over two million copies worldwide. Her work has won the Nebula and Locus Awards, and she is a 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Her Great Cities duology was a New York Times bestseller. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of Stuff Blowing Up. She's been an instructor for Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. Among other critical work, she was formerly the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer at The New York Times. In her spare time she's a gamer and gardner, responsible for saving the world from KING OZZYMANDIAS, her dangerously intelligent ginger cat, and his destructive sidekick, the Marvelous Mister Magpie. 

'Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She has an MFA from the Helen Zell Writers' Program at the University of Michigan. Her writing has won O. Henry Prizes, a Nommo Award for Short Story, a Henfield Prize, a Tyson Prize for Fiction, Hopwood Awards, and the Writivism Prize. Her work has been supported by an Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship, a Juniper Summer Workshop scholarship, an Aspen Words Emerging Writer fellowship, and her novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 Fiction Fellow with the Miami Book Fair, a 2022 MacDowell fellow, and she is the current Hortense Spillers Assistant Editor at Transition Magazine.

Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano. Her debut short story collection, Drinking from Graveyard Wells, won the Cornell University 2023 Philip Freund Prize for Creative Writing and was shortlisted for the Ursula LeGuin Prize for Fiction. Her novel manuscript-in-progress was selected by George R.R. Martin for the Worldbuilder Scholarship. She earned her BA at Cornell University and her MFA at UMASS Amherst. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop, Bread Loaf Writers Workshop, and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She is the Newhouse Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing and has taught at UMASS Amherst, Clarion West online, and the Juniper Institute for Young Writers. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Fellowship for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in the World Fantasy Award-winning anthology Year's Best African Speculative Fiction 2021 and the NAACP-award nominuted Africa Risen (Tor). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, F&SF, Tor.com, Lightspeed, FANTASY Magazine, and Fiyah Literary Magazine for Black Speculative Fiction. She is currrently at work on a novel.