 I'm going live on YouTube. Okay, I'm in a press report. Hello and welcome everyone. Thank you all for coming to today's program, which features writers in the new anthology, Black Panther, Tales of Wakanda. I'm John Smully and I'm a librarian with the San Francisco Public Library. While we're waiting for everyone else to join us, I want to take a moment to acknowledge our community and to tell you about a few of our upcoming programs. On behalf of the Public Library, we want to welcome you to the unceded land of the Ohlone Tribal people and to acknowledge the many Ramatush Ohlone Tribal groups and families as the rightful stewards of the lands on which we reside and work. Our library is committed to uplifting the names of these families and community members and we encourage you to learn more about first-person rights. SFPL Summer Stride Literacy Program is continuing through August. Summer Stride is the library's annual summer learning, reading and exploration program for all ages and abilities. Join us for author talks, reading lists, book giveaways, nature experiences and more. You can register today by visiting our website, sfpl.org. This Wednesday, July 28th. Join us for a time travel journey to the mid-century nightlife of San Francisco via the unique letter forms and designs of matchbooks and neon signs associated with legacy businesses. On Saturday, July 31st, join us for a special screening of the new documentary about restorative justice, The Prison Within, which will be followed by a panel discussion and Q&A with the filmmakers. On August 24th, please come to SFPL's Total SF Book Club Program when authors Daniel Handler and Gary Camilla discuss their new anthology, The End of the Golden Gate. On August 29th, the Medea Project's founder, Radessa Jones, will discuss the transformative power of her groundbreaking expressive therapy and performance methodology, which Jones developed from her 30 years of experience and correctional facilities throughout the world. The program's moderator is the author and actress, Lisa L. Biggs. Finally, on August 30th, SFPL's On the Same Page Book Club meets to discuss award-winning author, Jacqueline Woodson's new novel, Right at the Bone. This concludes my announcements. I will now, in a moment, turn the microphone over to this program's host, the author, playwright, producer, and Afrofuturist scholar, Dr. Kim McMillan. Earlier this year, Dr. McMillan hosted an amazing poetry program with SFPL, which you can see on the library's YouTube channel, and we're excited to welcome her back today. Kim will be introducing today's readers, and at the end of today's reading, we'll have a brief Q&A. If you have any questions or comments, please put them in the chat, and we will try to address these during the Q&A. If you enjoy today's program and want to read Black Panther Tales of Wakanda, you can borrow a copy from the library. Copies are also available to order from the Bird and Beckett Bookstore in San Francisco and from amazon.com. I will put all these links in the chat. Now please welcome today's moderator, Dr. Kim McMillan. Thank you very much. I want to say to our audience that working with the San Francisco Public Library is always a pleasure, and I want to welcome you all to the library. Black Panther Tales of Wakanda was edited by Jesse J. Holland. We're very lucky that he is here today, and it was also published by Marvel and Titan Books in March, 2021. Today's panelists are Jesse J. Holland, Glenn Parris, Danian Darrell Jerry, Kiyoko M, and Shri Renee Thomas. Black Panther Tales of Wakanda is a groundbreaking anthology celebrating Marvel's beloved Black Panther and his home of Wakanda. And now to our panelists. I'm going to just give you just a short reading of their accomplishments because all of them are just amazing. Jesse J. Holland's contribution to the anthology is Faith. Jesse is the author of the Black Panther Who is the Black Panther prose novel, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2019. He is also the author of The Invisible, the untold story of African-American slavery inside the White House, which was named as a 2017 Silver Medal Award winner in US history in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and one of the top history books of 2016 by Smithsonian.com. He is currently the Saturday host for C-SPAN Washington Journal, as well as the assistant professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University. I'd like you to give a warm welcome to Jesse J. Holland. Our next panelist is Kyoko M. Her contribution to the anthology is Ukabamba. And I'm always questioning whether I pronounced it right, correctly, Kyoko was kind enough to say, yes, you do. Kyoko is a USA Today best-selling author, a fangirl and an avid book reader. She is the author of the Black Parade Urban Fantasy Series and of Cinder and Bone Science Fiction Series. Her debut novel, The Black Parade, has been positively reviewed by Publishers Weekly and The New York Times and USA Today. She has been both a moderator and panelist for comic book and science fiction fantasy conventions, like DragonCon, who we also have people that will be there this year, September, see, I believe it's the second to the sixth, Glenn Parris, who is our next guest, will be there. And Glenn Parris' contribution to the anthology is the underside of darkness. Glenn writes medical mystery, afro-futuristic science fiction and historical fiction. The Renaissance of Aspirin, his debut novel, which garnered rave reviews and the paranormal fantasy, Unbitten, A Vampire Dream, have both been adapted to screenplays. His short story, The Tooth Fairy, Quest for Tear Haven, heads up the anthology where the veil is thin. Speculative fiction science novel, Dragon's Air, The Archaeologist's Tale, an allegory of culture, class, and imperialism is scheduled for publication by Outline Entertainment later on in 2021 or in early 2022. Currently, he is a medical director of a large rheumatology practiced in the northeast area of Atlanta suburbs. Cherie Renee Thomas, anthology contributor, her contribution is Heart of the Panther, The Heart of the Panther. Cherie is the author of Nine Bars Blue, Stories of an Ancient Future, and is the two-time World Fantasy Award-winning editor of the landmark Black Speculative Fiction Anthology, Dark Matter. She is the editor of the magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, founded in 1949, and the associate director, excuse me, the associate editor of Obsidian Literature and Arts in the African Diaspora, founded in 1975. Cherie co-edited Trouble the Waters, Tales of the Deep Blue, and it will be coming out, I believe, unless it's already out and later in 2021, I will have to ask her. And she is also co-curator of Curating the End of the World, Red Spring on Google's Cultural Institute platform. Danian Darryl Jerry's, his contribution to the anthology is of rights and passage. Danian is a writer, a teacher, a musician. He holds a master of fine arts and creative writing from the University of Memphis, where he teaches English literature. He is a Vona alum and a fiction editor of Obsidian. Danian founded Neighborhood Heroes, a youth arts program that employs comic books and literary arts. Currently, Danian revises his first, he's revising his first novel, Boy with the Golden Arm. He works, his work appears, or is forthcoming in fireside fiction, Apex Magazine, Trouble the Waters, Tales of the Deep, and the magazine of fantasy and fiction. So I'd like you all to give just a really warm welcome to everyone. And we're really happy that you're here today. Afrofuturism, speculative fiction, black speculative fiction is so much a part of what we do. And so to have people appreciate it is very important to us. Our first question will go to Jesse. Jesse, as the editor of Black Panther, Tales of Wakanda, please speak about your process. What culture I or surprised you in some of the stories that you received? And if there were any overarching themes that surprised you, what were they that came out out of the writing by yourself and the contributors? So what really, like you're reading and you go, oh my God, I wasn't expecting this. Was there something of that nature? Well, pretty much all of it was of that nature. Every story I read, I went, oh my God, this is so fabulous. Well, first of all, by the way, I wanna say thank you for everyone that showed up today. It's so great to see everyone come out for this program. I am so glad to be here with my other Black Panther writers. All of them are excellent writers and even better human beings. So I was so lucky to be part of this whole process. I actually came up with the idea for the anthology way back in 2018. I had just finished my first Black Panther novel, which was called Black Panther, Who Is the Black Panther? And the movie had just come out. And I wanted to get back into the world of Wakanda again, but I didn't wanna go there alone. There are so many great African-American speculative fiction and science fiction and fantasy writers out there. I wanted to see their visions of Wakanda, not just mine. I wanted to see their visions as well. So I went to Marvel and Titan and said, what we need to do is we need to come up with an anthology where more Afrocentric writers can try their hand at writing this great character. And so I was lucky enough to hook up with people like Cherie and Glenn and Dany and Kiyoko and ask them what they wanted to write about Wakanda. Many of the stories in the anthology come directly from the writer's minds. Now, there are a couple of stories in there that I said, you know what, here's an idea that I would love to write, but I wanna see someone else try it. But the majority of the stories in Tales of Wakanda are the creations of the writers. And so they would come and tell me, well, this is what I'm gonna write. And I would say, sure, just go write it, let me see it. And I would get in this wonderful story. So I was surprised at just about every story that is in Tales of Wakanda. And you know, that's the great thing about being the editor, you get to read it second. The writer gets to read it first, but you get to read it second. And you can ooh and ah before everybody else sees how wonderful the story was. And you know what, there are several themes that run through Tales of Wakanda. One of the biggest themes that you can see in Tales of Wakanda is that the Black Panther mythology is about more than just the Black Panther. You have people who are integral to that story, like Shuri, like the Dorma Holly Warriors, like Killmonger, like T'Challa's real mother. You have all of these characters that make Black Panther what it is. This is more than a story about one man. This is a story about a world. And what we did with Tales of Wakanda is really explore that world. We go and we talk about more than just T'Challa. We take T'Challa out of his comfortable surroundings, like Shuri did by bringing him here to America to the Mississippi Delta. We delve into the past as we did with some of the stories and talk about T'Challa's ancestors. So all throughout the book, if you're a person who loves Wakanda and want to know more about the country, it's past, it's present, and maybe even it's future, Tales of Wakanda is the book for you. I love what you said because that's true. It's like, you think you're gonna just be reading, okay, I'm just gonna go get this book to read. But once you see these stories, you become amazed at the creativity of the artists. For instance, Glenn Shuri and Danian, you all wrote about slavery and how it shaped our country and Wakanda also. Can each of you speak about why you chose these themes? What are ancestors went through in your writing and the importance of it in your work? And we'll start with Glenn. Glenn? I'm unmuted, okay. So the Black Panther has been something that's stuck with me since I was a small boy, reading the first appearance in Fantastic Four comic books back in the 60s. But then in the 70s, we were introduced to Roots by Alex Haley and you watched the chronicle of a slave being taken, his journey through early America of slavery and through the end of slavery and the reconstruction, et cetera. That pain was on both sides of the Atlantic. And I really didn't see it addressed that way again until the Black Panther movie came out again. And I thought it was a real tear jerker towards the end when the two first cousins, a Killmonger and T'Challa talked about Killmonger's fate. And if you haven't seen the movie, you've been on Mars for a while, but I'm not gonna spoil the ending, but it was very touching what Killmonger said. But the whole concept of how, how each person played a role in the slave trade, the European traders, Arab traders, the African kingdoms and those who were taken and never saw home again. And I wanted to touch on that. A power like Wakanda had to have known about it and had to have some kind of purpose to it. I can't imagine that something like that would have been random. And I really had to think of a reason that would have justified it as, it seemed like a good idea at the time maybe, but you had to have some acknowledgement of slavery. And I did the best I could with that in the underside of darkness. You did a good job, because you put it in the context of, we won't spoil the story for you, but you put in the context of the worlds that were there. Like we think of places like Atlantis or Lemuria. Did they really happen? But you were very creative in showing how that could have affected and why it was important what Wakanda did. So if you wanna tell a little bit more, we'll have you telling a bit more. But let's go on to Sherry. Sherry, I thought your use of the slavery to tell the story of America and Wakanda, you know, particularly Mississippi and the way you use the environment was particularly, in fact, all of you, I just wanna say that now, used your environments in ways that I was so impressive. Can you speak about that and why you chose Mississippi and why you spoke about that topic, particularly slavery? I'll mute myself, sorry. Thank you, Kim. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here today. The story isn't specifically about slavery, but it is a big part of it in some extent. And the reason why I took the Black Panther to the Mississippi Delta is because superheroes are for everyone, right? And we know with the film and with Jesse's novel, those stories made it around the world and back again, right? And so everyone has attached themselves to T'Challa and he means something different to different people. And one thing I was struck by was this ideal of this insular community that has all of these resources and powers and they're remaining in secret all these years so they can maintain that power. But I was very curious about what good it might have done in other parts of the world, not just on the African continent itself, but in the diaspora. And thinking about a way to protect yourself from constant attacks in a year when people are beginning to learn more about the Tulsa riots and Greenwood and some of the other places and realizing that those kinds of experiences happened across the country, they weren't isolated. I wanted to see what was a similar community that had not quite the same powers of Wakanda, but some of that power, maybe they traveled across the Atlantic Ocean during the transatlantic slavery trade, what would they do with it? And it would be a matter of protection for themselves to try to maintain their independence and to maintain safety. So that was one thing, reason why I want to do it. And two, when you're writing a story, even if you're writing in someone else's universe, it's important to be able to connect well to the story and to be able to write in a way that feels authentic and true to you. And so I know I wanted to write about the Mississippi Delta, which is places big, big important part in my heart. It's always been a bit of a muse for me. And so I was just so curious how T'Challa maybe under one of his other aliases that he has, he has one as a chef, right? What might bring him to the South? And what he might discover when he got there. So it's like, it's in my wheelhouse, it's a character. I love so much. And I just wanted to see what he could do with his power or what someone else might do with similar power if they had that ability. So yeah. That was excellent. Kim, you're muted. I really liked that you mentioned Greenwood and the Tulsa massacre and that you also created this community. That was a black community because they did exist. There was one in Florida, they were there where black people created these communities. And I think what you all have done in some form in your stories is really speak on our heritage, mixing the fantastical, but with some reality based. So Danian, what caused you to write on the matter of slavery? What brought it up in your story? And why was it important to you? What inside you became fulfilled by writing this? Because it was excellent. I loved it. Okay. Well, I think the idea of slavery kind of stem from the premises self in my story, I write about one of T'Challa's ancestors great, great, great, great, great grandfather who was a black panther himself to assume to. And to assume to pretty much goes to America to investigate the disappearance of his nephew, Crispus. And so basically I started writing this story. It's sort of like slavery, kind of like how could slavery not be in the story? And then as I kept on writing it, what I found out was that the black panther mythos really can't be separated from black history. For one reason is because like the black panther mythos, it covers like black history all the way back to prehistoric days. So for me, actually it was a chance to just sort of participate in Marvel's track record for addressing history. As I started writing the story, I think the biggest idea that came to me was the fact that everybody needs a hero and who needed a hero more than the enslaved Africans and African-Americans in America during the 1700s. Also the theme of like, what is freedom and justice and how does that relate to like different groups in terms of power? One man's freedom is another man's subjugation. I too, like Glenn wanted to investigate the idea of what was Wakanda doing during the slave era, right? They had to have known about it. Why wouldn't they intervene, right? And as I was writing it, what I found out was they did intervene. Just like Wakanda has helped in the Marvel universe, Wakanda has helped black people all the way up until today, right? But they have to do it in a way to where they can protect themselves. So I found this out as I was writing the story and that was cool just to sort of like position the story within the story. So sort of like position the story within that whole tradition. I will also say that I really just enjoyed like experimenting with the way superpowers would have worked and function in this colonial period, right? Because superpowers have a certain relationship with technology as we know it today. So I wanted to work with how was, I wanted to investigate how superpowers would work back in colonial times. For instance, in my story, there's like a supervillain group called the planters. And I just imagined, I was just like, okay, well, during the transatlantic slave trade, right? They must have been like not, they've had access to all types of things, right? Just going all over the world, right? So maybe they were selling slaves, but you also had the fact that they were selling boats. If they were selling slaves and boats and they're selling the things to protect us, to protect the transport of the slaves and boats. And I'm referring to companies like the East India Bay Company. So sort of like looking at the East India Bay Company adding that element of fantasy to it and say, well, they're probably like dividend to supernatural things as well. What does that look like, right? So that was really fun. And also I just, I think just dealing with like African-American people dealing with black people and how we made it through those times, right? How we made it when we were holding on for a hero that sometimes, you know, it looked like the hero was not gonna show up. Like what do you do? How do you survive, right? So in short, those are some of the ideas that I thought about as I was writing that story. And I would say one other thing, just taking that hero's journey and just applying that to the era because for me it's all about the idea of a hero, right? Come into lend assistance to Africa, to enslave the Africans. I love what you said. And we're gonna talk about one other thing. I'm gonna ask everyone that question after we finish speaking with Piyoko. The question of were any of you upset that the, it remind me of Star Trek, the prime directive, you know, the directive that you could not go out. You could not tell people about Wakanda. The idea that Wakanda did not want, they wanted to say safe. And their picture of staying safe was making sure that they were a kingdom that was hidden. And I wonder, I wanna know all of you, did any of you have any disagreements about that? Because with Sheree's story, the Digimonie, how do you pronounce the name Sheree? Digimonie, is that how you pronounce it? Gimoni. Sheree. Gimoni. Gimoni. What she did was so brave, but it went against what would be like the prime directive, so to speak, but what we cannot do. And so I wanna just talk afterwards about how do you all feel about that? Now, Kyoko, I, of course, I love Okoye. I think who doesn't love Okoye? If they don't love her, there's something wrong. But the way she's created the masculine and the feminine are just so, they're just both are powerful. This is a powerful woman. And you've created a powerful woman around your story who is dealing with something that we all are dealing with right now, like kidnapping of children. And so what I'm curious, curious, did you take some of that, the ideas from the headlines and why you chose Okoye to basically be the center of that story? Because when you think of Wakanda, I think a lot of us do not think of criminals. We think of this place that is our utopia, but you opened it up to a world that I was frankly surprised at. And so can you speak about that and how Okoye was able to function in that world? Actually, that was a subject matter that I thought was really interesting just from being involved with this anthology and with learning about Black Panther as a whole. Like you said, I think a lot of people kind of mistake it for a utopia. And while it's definitely the peak of what we would definitely want, but there's no such thing as perfection as people are imperfect in general. And even with all this advanced society with the lack of colonialism, with the lack of microaggressions and the things that we as Black Americans deal with, it doesn't mean that there would be no crime. If that were the case, there wouldn't be a need for Black Panther. It would just be a completely peaceful society and there would be no need for T'Challa except to protect the borders and make sure people weren't coming into from the outside. And so that was one aspect of it that I wanted to discuss is that they do have their own set of problems even if they don't have to deal with the things that we as Black Americans or Black people in other countries have to deal with. And in terms of the kidnapping itself, it came from a couple of different things because what really fascinated me about Okoye is her devotion to not only the throne but to protecting her country because that comes first. It even comes before herself. And so I thought that balance that Okoye has as a character is this amazing warrior who is so focused and so badass and so courageous. But at the same time, she has this vulnerability to her. She has this intelligence to her. She's a very effective general but I was also just a very fascinating woman in general. And so I wanted to play with those two ideas by bringing in the idea of a child being kidnapped because unfortunately that is a worldwide problem. It's not exclusive to Africa or Wakanda. And I thought that that would be something that would really get to Okoye whether she in this particular continuity had children or not. I think she would be very, very protective of the young girls knowing that she is an exception getting to be a dormalage and knowing that that could be one of her students she trained someday made it very personal to her that she was gonna bring that little girl home completely safe and make sure that the people who took her paid for their crimes. You did it excellently and you're right. It's been so much a part of our, in the newspapers, on the media, the kidnapping of children that when I first started reading it, it got to me. And you saw another part of Okoye. You saw this really, this side that just was, the devastation that happens to people around kidnappings. So that was very, very, very well written. Okay, so give your honest opinion. Do you all agree or not agree with the idea that the Black Panther world should be hidden in this way that it is? Any thoughts on that or and not take part in helping? Because it even comes out in the movies. Anyone, anyone could speak on this matter. Anyone? Okay, go ahead, go ahead, Lynn. So yeah, you know, the idea of a superpower projecting power worldwide is a challenge. You've seen the United States struggle through that over the past 100, 150 years. Trying to take the moral high ground, being sucked back into selfish means. I couldn't imagine that a superpower like Wakanda couldn't also face the same thing, making mistakes. And let's call them what they are, they're mistakes. Allowing the slave trade to go on was a mistake. It was a calculated choice, but it was a mistake. And the Wakandans didn't think that slavery would deteriorate into what it became in America. It wasn't like that in the Roman times, it wasn't like that for the Chinese, the Mongol Empire took over. When they took slaves, they used slaves to the top of their abilities. If they were professors, if they were doctors, if they were priests, whatever they were, they were respected as human beings. This was the first time that slaves were denigrated to the level of animals and treated like property. They were own, yes, but they weren't treated as inanimate objects. And that's what it became in the United States. And I could see where the Wakandans might think that maybe some of their war dogs can sort of turn that river and change things by influencing key people in the nexus of history. But in my story with T'Challa's ancestor in 100 years earlier, he's lamenting that they didn't do more, couldn't do more. And that even Harriet Tubbin, who was a war dog, couldn't do more to free more slaves and change the United States. But those are the kinds of challenges that any superpower has to balance out, depending on the prevailing opinions of the day. A small country with a lot of power, like Wakanda, that also has to stay secret, has even more challenges, even if they are 70 decades to 100 decades ahead of everybody else. Okay, so Kim, I'm going to hit the other side of that because Glenn is always so reasonable. He's always so calm, and he always sees the proper side of things. I'm gonna come in from the movie Killmonger side of that argument. Knowing that there is someone out there in the world that has the power to end slavery and decides not to keep themselves comfortable, I would say that is a huge mistake. And so I could see where the movie Killmonger is coming from. Because if Wakanda had acted, perhaps America wouldn't be the way it is today with racism, sexism, homophobia, et cetera. So I come in from the side of the argument that Wakanda made not only one mistake in not originally jumping in, but they made a mistake every second of every minute of every hour of every day from the point they found out about slavery and they didn't do anything about it. They had the power to act. And the only reason why they didn't act is because it wasn't affecting them directly. So I would tell you that they made a huge mistake and that's something Wakanda will be making up to the rest of the world for the rest of its existence. I just wanna dive in on that. I'm going to add. Beyond the implications for war, freedom and liberation, it's also a question of scientific knowledge and sharing that right on the continent in which this fictional Wakanda exists, if we have the same history and the climate change and droughts and famines and things that are taking place across the continent over time, they also were in a position, a unique position to share agricultural knowledge and expertise that might have helped save millions of lives of an Ethiopia, Somalia, all across the continent, all across the horn. And so it's not even just a matter of liberation or fighting colonialism or neocolonialism. It's about literally just saving lives. And so the historic character I have from my story, Heart of a Panther, she actually did not agree with that, that vow that they made of silence, of secrecy and was using what her healing ability to try to help some of the African nations near her, some of the tribes near her and unfortunately got caught up in the accelerated period of the slave trade and ends up in the Americas. Doesn't ever give the name of where she came from, but definitely shared some of the power, the magic, some of those that she had and it's passed down from one generation to the next in Mississippi. So for me, it's about the agricultural expertise and knowledge, which of course, many people were taken for their expertise into slavery, specific groups of the of the Mende and Sierra Leone were taken because they knew how to grow rice. They're taken right to certain parts of the country for that Virginia and elsewhere and on and on. But it's so many ways that it could have made a difference in world history, but then there's the question of if it's just one nation with this power and if all the other nations gang up on them, what do we have? Do they exist? Will they be able to withstand all of that? So I understood why there would be this vow of secrecy, but I don't know how the people could have held it up for so long. I feel like there would have been a lot more discomfort about that and a lot more people breaking that rule. Does anyone? Are you ahead? Keiko? So one thing that really struck me is that at least in the way that it was portrayed in the film, I thought it was, at least it was a reasonable argument. You could see on paper why to them it made sense to remain hidden given just the outright hatred that there is for Africans in general, and that's on any continent. And so I mean, I even related back to if you think about President Obama, the white supremacists in this country hated him so much, they were like, the next time you get a president, I want the literal worst white dude I can find, just because of Obama. It's like they had a checklist. Everything that was Obama, I'm into the polar opposite. I want him to be stupid, awful, ignorant, bad at his job, all of that. And that's just in the context of 2018 America. And so again, if you flip that back to a powerful country that doesn't really, it's not interested in colonizing other places. It's just there protecting his people, being fruitful, doing what it's doing. I can see why they would arrive at that decision, but I side with everyone else in that. I think that, again, I can see the theory, but no, the amount of suffering that all of these people had to do, and they could have been helped in so many different ways. And I think that that's always been something that's important about African culture, is that feeling of family, of supporting others, all of those different things that they teach each other and teach the world. I definitely think that they should have intervened, but I do agree that at the same time, if all of the other nations had ganged up to be like, hey, that's not fair. They have all these things here. We deserve all of that. Why won't you let us have it? They would try to come and take it. And so I can definitely see the logic behind it, but at the same time, I think that it's not worth it for all of those lives that were destroyed and people who never saw their homes again, people who never saw their families again. I definitely think that they should have intervened. And even if they didn't wanna do it directly, if they wanted to find a way to kind of still keep themselves under the radar and be able to assist, I think that should have been done. Yeah, yes. Thank you, Kiyoko. Danian, what do you think about this? Well, I think I'm thinking about it from like the perspective of like the story I wrote. And so like, to slow to, the Wakandan king, right? He has a choice, right? Well, okay, you can lend aid or you can bring the troops and you can help your people, right? But see the thing is also it's funny because it makes me think about things fall apart, right? Around not even thinking about like America and the transatlantic slave trade, but just the idea of the disarray, right? Of even Africa and the countries that are around Wakanda. So it's almost like, yes, you could come out into the open and you could share your resources, but it's not necessarily the idea. I mean, I agree like, you know, other places like can, you know, they can gang up on you and all this, but you also have to think about, okay, the people who I'm trying to help, are they ready for my assistance or can they even receive it? I think for like, in from a Wakandan's perspective, you might say, okay, well, yes, I can like help these people, but if they're in such a disarray, right? Well, they only take my assistance and they ask for more or they take my assistance and what they're really trying to do is just like, you know, help enslaved me too. I think for the Wakandan's, I think it was like also the idea of, okay, well, let's stay out of all the political intrigue of it, the neo-colonial aspect of it. The idea that if I help someone, right? The same person that I'm helping might draw me into something, right? That will endanger not only myself, but the culture and the heritage that I'm trying to protect, that's like at least a thousand years old. So that's sort of like another, I guess, aspect. I guess another reason why maybe the Wakandan's would be hesitant is because like what they were trying to protect was important and maybe they had to think about, okay, yes, they could try to help others, right? But as I said before, right? Is the group ready to be, are they ready to be assisted, right? Are they ready to like free themselves essentially, right? I agree with you all. This is really a hard subject. And so I'm waiting for someone to create a what if on this whole idea of perhaps Wakandan in another world did help to stop set slavery. But another question I want to ask you all, and I really thank you. Your answers make you think, make you kind of think. What do you think Black Panther means to the Black race? Does it mean something different than the average person who sits in the theater? Think about the first time you went to see Black Panther. What was there something about it that just shocked you? Was there something that you think pertain to Black bodies that somehow things were different? The idea that this superhero was just raiding supreme at the box office and showing Black excellence. So we'll start with Glen. What do you think? What do you think, Glen? All of my career, I've heard that, oh yes, we're letting you in. Your race has never really contributed anything. You're sort of mimicking what you're being taught. This is not real knowledge, real intelligence. And when we come up with innovative things, things that have never been thought of before, it's like, oh my God, how did you think of that? How did you think of that? And it's literally exactly that. How is it possible that you could have thought of that? Your brain is not supposed to be able to do that. And we keep doing it over and over and over again. And we've done it for hundreds of years and we leave them scratching their heads. How did they do that? We couldn't do it, how did they do it? So I really think that the whole concept of Wakanda answers that. It's like, we've always done it. And when the foot is taken off of our necks, we can do it even better. But we can even do it with a foot on our necks. And no one else can do that. But we can create amazing things with a foot on our throat. And I think that's what it really showed. Yeah. Thank you, Glenn. Anyone else, what do you think happened when to us as African-Americans, did you see something different in the air or were things different when Black Panther came out? You know? I think. Go ahead, go ahead. So one thing that occurred to me when I saw the film for the first time was, I thought that it was Black people and African people getting to be excellent, but not watered down and not through the filter of the usual American lens. And what I mean by that is again, like if you take the publishing industry right now it's 81% white. And so it's always been, oh, we'll let you do your thing, but you know, we've got to dress it up and make it look palatable. So not only, you're not really, you can write to Black people, but we want to tweak things and adjust things so that the white audiences will still be pleased and still like get it. And I didn't feel like Black Panther had that sort of like accidental over-striding or intentional in some cases where they were trying to like still make the white people feel good about themselves in certain points because that can happen in, especially American fiction, whether that's TV shows, books or what have you, they always like kind of have some sort of bridge character to, you know, keep them happy. This was unapologetically Black and unapologetically African, everything about it, I think dealt directly with things that we as Black people are familiar with and have dealt with our entire lives. And at the same time, like I said, it's something that was not a surprise to me. I was very aware of Black excellence and fiction and all these different things and every aspect of that film, they went out of their way to make it exceptional. And I think what was important is to show the world, it's always been like this, but we've always been kind of like pigeonholed in what we can do. And this is an example of if you leave us alone, this is the kind of product that we are capable of. If you just back off and don't worry about, you know, who will and won't like it or what you think should be in the story, we're going to show you what we think should be in the story. And that's, I think, why it turned out to be such an amazing experience. Yeah, I think it was an interesting experience for like different people from around the world. For just, I'm just going to speak for myself as an African-American, it was just great to see not so much colorism in the casting of it. There were all the beautiful shades of blackness represented there. It was wonderful to see African actors playing major roles because this is ostensibly an African super kingdom. Even though it was created by two white men in the 60s inspired by the Black Panther movement to something that was happening in Mississippi and in California, it's supposed to be African. And so seeing also all the different visual art and all the time that Ruth Carter took into taking textiles and beautiful fabrics and things and things that come from different nations in Africa and the continent of Africa, that was wonderful to see, to hear the authentic language of T'Challa's father spoken and we get the subtitles, all of that was just amazing. So just as a person in a diaspora, I was happy to see all of that wondrous things. And just to see it, even though we did have the CIA agent, which I'm like, nobody likes the CIA. So I mean, the assassinators of LaMumba and others. So now he's like a hero and an ally in this movie. But we understood why do you need to have that role and have that connection, especially with Killmonger's character in his background as well, MITN, as well as being in that world. So it was just very empowering. And I would just say, as a Memphian, we saw it so many times over and over again, whole school buses and church buses of people in costume, I might add in many respects, intergenerational support because we've always known what we can do with amazing stories and you can just go through time and just see all the excellence that's been there. And I will just say this going back to something that Glenn said, people in the world know that too, because if you are not that talented, you don't need so many laws and codes and so many feats on your neck if they are so incapable. It's an awareness, it's always been there. And it was, I think it was a fear of what that excellence might do on a larger scale. After all, some of the earliest civilizations of the world come from Africa. And we're carried on through the rest of the world and new cultures and societies and amazing civilizations created. So we are the cradle and there's no question about it. And when you go back to our math, you go back to the sciences, you go back to the history and you go back past the translations and you go past the Phoenicians in the Greek, you know where the information comes and they tell you in a lot of the primary sources where the information came from. So it's this business like this kind of erasure in history that even created this moment in time where you could have another conversation and try to create another mythology about us not being excellent. That was not the given, I'll just say that. That was a new story that they were able to tell in America. But that wasn't the biggest story. And if you don't need it, you don't need these laws. You don't need these rules. You don't need to tell ignorant people that they will be put to death if they learn to read and write. Because what would they do with that knowledge? Well, they know what they would do with that knowledge. So I always like to push back on that because I think it does us no good to keep reiterating false narratives, I guess. Yeah. Yeah, I like, I too, I want to touch on the idea of black excellence and Wakanda, right? To be a Wakandan, you have to be excellent. To be a member of the Dormilogy, you have to be a master, right? To train with the Korye, you have to already be a master, right? So for me, that's what Wakanda represents. The idea that black people, we have to master our trades in everyday life. No matter what we do, we have to be excellent. We really don't have a choice, right? That's what Black Panther represents to be. If you're a griot for T'Challa, you have to know all of the history, all of the songs of Wakanda. You have to know everything, right? Before your first day on the job, right? T'Challa isn't just the king because he inherits it. He has to fight for it, right? Every so often, he has to prove his excellence every time, right? Shuri has to be excellent at what she does. In the movie, she has to be an excellent scientist. She can't be with T'Challa if her coordinates or if her facts or figures are even one decimal off, right? She can't perform that job. In the book, she takes over and she is the Black Panther and she cannot be the Black Panther if she is not excellent. So for me, what Wakanda represents is the fact that black people have to be excellent all the time, all of us. I can chime in on that too. Even going all the way back to the 60s, T'Challa couldn't just be Captain America. He had to be Captain America. He had to be Reed Richards. He had to be Tony Stark's all rolled up into one. And he had to be Namor. He literally had to be the counterpart to the Prince of Atlantis. So again, it's this, you have to be twice as good to get half as far. But that's the story. And we've all lived it. Jesse, got any final words on that? Anyone? They have said everything that needs to be said on this subject. So I'm just gonna say let's move on because I can only just drag it out longer. Okay, great. Well, by the way, I wanna say that this is so important to me. The fact that we are talking about something that is so positive, it just is just positive. Why don't we do this right now? Why don't you all, we'll start with Jesse. Reed, we're gonna just reach very short passages, no more than about a minute of each of your stories to kind of give our audience a taste and why they need to pick up this book. And if they've already picked it up, they need to buy another one for a friend. Okay, so let's start with you, Jesse. And I completely agree. If you haven't bought the book or borrowed the book, go out and get it right now. And if you have one copy, go buy a friend a copy. It's certainly worth it. So just as a little intro here, my story is called Faith. It's a story about T'Challa meeting his God, Bast, and having a discussion over who really controls Wakanda. Is it Bast or is it the line of Bishanga? And this conversation becomes a bit more heated when Bast introduces T'Challa to her daughter. So I'll just pick up here. T'Challa opened his eyes. It was late evening again, and he was in the courtyard of an ancient open-air sandstone temple surrounded by towering columns covered with imagery of Bast and her different incarnations. The ruin walls had crumbled on one side, huge stone slabs turned on their sides, obscuring the crumbling stadium-style seating in the setting sun. At the center of the football-sized field, directly opposite to T'Challa sat a girl. Her arms curled around her legs. She was quietly rocking back and forth. At first glance, he thought she was crying. Her features hidden from him by a child-like posture, slender but with powerful legs. She was dressed in a simple dual-strap white sheath dress that contrasted with her dark, stable skin. Long black straight hair cascaded around her shoulders. Despite her youthful appearance, she appeared tall, fit, and spelt as if she ran down antelopes on a regular basis. The one thing she doesn't look like to T'Challa thought is a god. Could this be the one with whom Bast planned to replace his entire lineage? The very thought yielded a variety of conflicting emotions which he tamped down. Slowly he walked toward her, noticing that he was wearing his panther habit, Bast's doing. Stopping within an arm's length of the young woman, T'Challa took a deep breath, inhaling the rich earthy scent she exuded and that his mind immediately connected with Bast on the ancestral plains, some yet somehow lighter and more floral. Nefertiti? The girl ignored him, continuing to rock back and forth. A low moan escaped from her throat and Sweat beaded on her brow. T'Challa hesitated, his next move unclear. Was this how he looked when he communed with Bast? He never thought that how his Dora Mahali or others might see him during the times he conversed with his god. Did he moan and rock like this? He thought not. If she was Bast's daughter, would it be the height of disrespect to touch the earthly manifestation of his god, especially while she was in this state? Bast wanted him here, that much was clear. But what were the protocols? Was there a ritual? Was this what Bast meant by reminding him that he had missed out on parts of his religious training because of his father's untimely death? Nothing ventured, nothing gained, he thought. T'Challa slowly lowered himself in front of her on one knee and gently placed his hand on her back. I'll stop there and let you imagine what happens next. Go pick up faith. Once again, definitely pick up this book. Wakanda, a Black Panther Tales of Wakanda. Shree, you wanna read about a minute of your story to give them a taste of it? I think they will enjoy it quite a bit. Oh, sure, okay, I'm gonna skip the beginning. In the beginning, the herbs are dying, all right? So in spite of himself, T'Challa has to make a trip. So he's arrived at where he needs to be or where he thinks he needs to be. So I'm just gonna start from here. A sun-bleached American flag hung motionless from its metal pole in the front of the house. The air was humid, thick enough to step through. The T'Challa marches of walking through a closed door. This was not the comforting warmth of Wakanda, but a busier, mischievous kind of weather, the kind that smacked you in the face and dared you to do anything about it. With its postcard perfect shade trees and huge wrap-around front porch equipped with a rocking chair, the property looked idyllic. T'Challa was not fooled. He sensed gathering storms, more thunder, fire. You must be brother flowers, he said. A raised eyebrow in silence for his only reply. T'Challa tilted his head, tried again. You are Ricky Doc. The man stared at T'Challa, appraised him with an expression the Black Panther could not quite make. His heartbeat was steady, insured his breathing smooth, efficient. Ricky Doc, the brother flowers took off his hat, revealed shoulder-lamped locks that spiraled across his shoulders. He sat the hat on a rusted hook and turned to gaze at T'Challa. Hardness set around his mouth and narrowed his eyes. Family calls me Ricky Doc. Mr. Okonkwo, I presume. His was a voice that held secrets. T'Challa had heard such a voice before. Ribbons of sound and anguish, grief that threatened to swallow a bursting hard hole. Why yes, T'Challa said. The hairs on the back of his neck prickled. A coldness in a strange familiar scent wafted from Ricky Doc. Awareness that underscored every word he said. T'Challa did not need his super-enhanced senses to know that the man distrusted him. Thank you. Excellent. By the way, I just want to give a shout out to our audience. I want to say we're going to, the last 10 minutes, we're going to take care of questions. I'm reading them and I'm loving them. And we just really appreciate this kind support. Glen, you want to give us about a minute of the underside of darkness? Sure. So this passage comes from, this is some pillow talk between the Black Panther of 1912 and his lover, Asalatu. All Hausa and Bantu kings had kept the existence of Wakanda sacred for centuries. The Hausawa had always regarded Wakanda as the jewel of the continent. Posity of open water supported sparse wildlife in contrast to the vast Roman zebra herds, the south that characterized the Serengeti. Only Wakandan kings were privileged to ride the sacred strike horse. It was said that the gods allowed no other men to bridle the zebra. So that mortal men would never forget the celestial orishas shaped the whole continent to resemble the zebra's head. It was a point of consternation among recent Wakandan kings that the zebras were stolen from the motherland and placed in captivity. What were they called again? To Kayla thought for a moment, zooms. His private herd rested in a corral, secure in the knowledge that no lion, hyena or barbarian from overseas would dare approach the Wakandan capital. Our war dogs report progress in the new world in Europe. To Kayla stared off into near distance as he spoke. But the beacon of freedom, once called Moses, approaches her life's end. So this is the source of your troubles, I'll still be concluded. The decision to see the new world with our diaspora was a painful one for all. Only the royal families knew that slavery served as our wedge. Guided by Wakandan war dogs, they secretly leveraged the direction of Western civilization, prevented consolidation of power and the ultimate destruction of civilization. We contain the Mongols from extending their reign across Eurasia. We'll stare these new Americans too. They're the sleeping giants we have to watch in the decades to come. But the suffering to Kayla hesitated in his response. That we did not expect. Slavery was never like this, abomination they created. Even the Mongols used slaves to the top of their abilities. Treated them like, well, like people. I'll end it there and let you read it for yourself. Have that play. Thank you. I'm loving this guys. Kiyoko, could you please read from your piece? Sure. So my story is called Ukubamba, it means catch. The general idea is that Okoye has been charged by T'Challa to find and bring home a young girl named Nandi who was kidnapped in Wakanda and they're trying to stop the traffickers from sending her outside of the continent. There is no honor among thieves. Okoye knew she had always known. She had seen it for herself on the streets of Wakanda. She had seen it in a chaotic world outside their beloved city. She had seen how men were willing to betray each other but most of all themselves for want of profit. She had seen what became of men like Ulysses claw. It had stolen the life of King T'Challa. To her, there were few things on earth as low as a thief and King T'Challa knew it too. He stood facing the window in the throne room, hands folded behind him, his posture perfect and straight as it should have been for he was royalty. T'Challa had suffered greatly throughout his life. He had been asked to wear a heavy burden as king and the leader of Wakanda's tribes. Yet that burden did not show in how he stood, regal, steady and powerful. He was not simply a king but a leader. He knew how to rally his people and how best to protect them whether he was alone or with his Dormilaje or even the Avengers. Okoye valued his intelligence as much as his strength where a true warrior needed both brain and brawn. And he appreciated her the same way. After saluting her fellow Dormilaje, the general walked up to his right and gave her salute, my king. T'Challa nodded his head to her in respect. General, I apologize for summoning you so suddenly but we have an emergency. The king faced her his expression grave but she could see hints of anger burning in his brown eyes. A seven-year-old girl was taken from one of the border town. He touched the camoyo beads around his left wrist. A hologram of a smiling child with thick curls that fell around her double cheeks appeared. Her name is Nandi. Okoye's eyes narrowed, when? Less than an hour ago. Her mother Liana had brought her to the market. They were chased and then attacked in an alley. They snatched Nandi and broke Liana's leg so she could not follow. She said they were headed south. Oh, stop there. Excellent. I say, guys, hear these stories, pick up the book. This is good, this is good writing. Our last minute read is Damien. Damien, can you just give it to us? Yeah, sure. In my story of Rice and Passage to Swoon 2, to Swoon 2 has traveled from Wakanda to Boston and he's looking for his contact in Boston. And his contact is at this plantation. It looks like a plantation but it's actually something else. And so this is where we are. So he's outside sort of like checking out the plantation and the overseers and the slaves moving around and that sort of thing. To Swoon 2 found the white Dutch mansion at the end of a long trail boarded by forest. Bone-tired workers soiled and sweaty, lumbered from a tobacco field that stretched in neat green rows to dark trees that barricaded the distance. Perched on a limb, he washed as the workers trudged to ragged log cabins arranged in a cove. To Swoon 2 waited until the moon peaked in the stash, trundled overhead. The wind carried whispers and praises, a night song worthy of the finest griot. He thought about his nephew and the lies he heard at the tavern. Either way, in sake who will receive his rice from his king, the panther goddess growled in his mind. To Swoon 2 leapt into the night in the wind, the voices called to him, called the panther goddess that roared in his heart. He slipped through the treetops in the warm night. The spirit song reminded him of the conjurers back home before long the words took shape, called the black panther in the tongues of his ancestor. On his wedding night, his new queen, Safia, had sang of her ancestors. She hummed and kissed Swoon 2 as a thousand, as a hundred arrows flew through their bedroom window. Sophia's cousin had led a rebellion for the throne and her hand, but Swoon 2 quashed the insurrection before it started. Sophia watched her husband decapitate her cousin. Horrified, she fled Wakanda and took refuge in the Jabari lands, becoming a priestess for the white gorilla. He'd been alone since. Swoon 2 leapt into a clearing, found a ring of singers and dancers, a circle of women sang praises, their dark hands and their darker voices over their heads. A couple danced in the center of the circle. Swoon 2 had seen the tall man on horseback escorting the weary laborers to their quarters. The black panther recognized the woman from the group of women preaching the gospel back at Smith's tavern. The couple thrust their hands out and jumped in unison. All around them, the people danced and sang with all the passion and voice their bodies could muster. Their arms sliced the wind. They swung their heads and bounced on their heels. They praised bass for her endless bounty for giving them strong arms and legs, and most of all, for the health of their lost family. Now, and for the health of their lost families. Most of all, they thanked her for their king, the avatar who was prophesized to one day come and free them from their bondage. Thank you. By the way, that's one of my favorite scenes in your story. It's very action. It's alive. I love all the stories. And so I have favorite scenes in each one of your stories. Because a lot of times our audience is a mixture of writers and people who love to listen to writers. Can you talk about each one of you, how you got into writing? Just give them, and if there's any statement that might be helpful to the people listening. Because that's what they needed. It sometimes is hard to get that pencil on the paper and just write or at your computer. And so anything that you think might be helpful to our audience would be greatly appreciated. Jesse, as our fearless leader, you want to start? I will just say upfront that if you're a writer that means you're a reader, you should be reading all the time. I can also tell you that I understand that how sometimes you get to a point where you don't want to put pen to paper. But if you read that next great book and you get inspired, you read someone else's work and you get inspired. And in fact, I have a couple of movies that I watch that I can watch these movies and then I'm ready to write some more. So find that muse for you. Find that thing that makes you want to write. For me, sometimes for me it's Spike Lee movies. I can sit and watch a couple of Spike Lee movies and I'm ready to sit and start writing again. Weirdly enough, the movie Shakespeare in Love is one of the movies that I watch. And then by the time I get to the end, I'm like, where is my pen? I need to get to writing again. So find that thing that makes you want to write and watch it, read it, listen to it, and get back and get to work. Thank you. What about you, Cherie? What would you say to our audience that might help the budding writer or just how you started to just give them some, that they can do this too? Give them a lot of hope. I grew up in a family of storytellers. So for me, reading and writing and telling stories is about the orality of it. So I wasn't intimidating by writing on the page because it was the stories that were being told, if that makes sense. So I was always writing. And I guess it wasn't until somebody else noticed outside of my family, noticed that I was a good writer in their opinion and that I should be writing more for the public, that I have the courage to start taking my own writing that I did in private and start trying to publish or write for the college paper and all that kind of thing. So I think you should find you a community of writers if you can. Take an online workshop. There are a lot more now since the pandemic than there ever were before. And they're also a lot more affordable than they had been, I think. Some of them are free. There are communities and libraries. San Francisco Public Library probably has a circle of aspiring writers who meet regularly. And that can help give you courage because you're all learning together. Author Flowers was a big inspiration for me and Memphis. And so just find that community of people that you can help begin writing your stories down on the page. And if you're scared about writing first, record it. Almost every smartphone has a voice app on it and just tell the stories if you're telling it to a good friend, someone who supports you so that you don't feel intimidated and just tell it naturally, yeah. Thank you. And I want to say we don't know you, but we support you. We support you because you're supporting us. And we just want you to know that. So Glenn, what would you do? What would you say to help to people who want to write or who have this idea and they may be scared or even about your beginnings as a writer? So, I was that kid who was always scolded for daydreaming in class. And what I was doing, I'd hear something interesting in class, whether it was a math problem or science problem, something from history. And I'd sort of go off and, wow, I wonder what if we did it this way? What would have happened if he'd done something different? And I would sort of take off in those tangents in the middle of class. And I'd miss the next thing the teacher said. I was always in trouble. But taking those kinds of tangential thoughts often to your own, write notes, make up stories, make up pieces of stories, make up scenes and keep a catalog of those things on your own personal library, if you will. Because there will be times when you're gonna want to recycle that and put it into the kind of story that it really finds as home. And the beauty of being an unpublished writer, I won't say a starter or a beginner, I'll say an unpublished writer, is that you have unlimited time to put these pieces together. People like Cherie and Danian and Kyoko and Jesse, these folks do this for a living, they're professionals. And they have six months, maybe 12 months, put something together. They've got to get it right, right off the bat. But as an unpublished writer, you've got years, in some cases you've got decades, take your time, don't forget anything that you've written, pull it back out of mothballs and find its home in a story that you're putting together. And that's the way you learn to write and read. As Jesse said, read, read, read. Because the more you read, the better you're gonna get at writing. Yes, thank you, Glenn. And Kyoko, before you start, we have a lovely, a seori who said that she's Japanese-American and having you here just made her feel better. I love getting these messages in chat. They're just absolutely beautiful. So Kyoko, what would you say? What would you say to the people? So I actually got my start writing part, it's kind of like a combination of things. So my parents read to me every night when I was a kid. And so I grew up naturally loving books. I had the support of three absolutely genius, wonderful supporting English teachers growing up. I was lucky enough to have three in sequence. And all of them noted my writing ability and really, really fostered that in me and encouraged me to keep going. And I got to college and I went to a lecture given by a UGA alumnus named Jackson Pierce and she talked about publishing. And I was like, oh my God, maybe I should do that because I don't wanna be a vet because I got like two years in college and I was like, no, I don't like this. So I started writing professionally instead of just where I had been writing over and over in so many different capacities, but just for fun because in my brain, I didn't really think that it was something I could or wanted to do for a living until I saw writing in that context. And what I advise people is it can be very intimidating seeing other people's writing, especially people who have won awards and people who have all of these amazing accolades like the authors that are here and it can make you feel kind of small. And so you're like, well, nobody needs to hear what I have to say, somebody's probably already said it better. It's not about a skill level. No one can tell a story the way you can tell it. Even if you're addressing a plot line that sounds like it's been done a thousand times before, you are always gonna add something unique to it because you as a person are unique. And so never feel like, oh, nobody wants to read this. I guarantee you, someone out there is interested in what you have to say and the way that you can say it that no one else can. And so that's very, very important for you to remember, especially if you're just starting out because it's very tough. Like I remember before I started the Black Parade, I was gonna do like an urban fantasy take on like Norse and Greek gods. And then I read American gods and I went, we're good. New game and nailed it. I will never ever be able to do it better than this. So I'm good. I just threw it out the window and I went with something that ended up being, I was very passionate about, but that's the other thing of why these wonderful people are also telling you to read because sometimes you don't have to write what you think other people will like, just write the things that come naturally to you that you find fascinating, interesting and important to them. Beautiful words. Danian, what would you say to our audience? Well, I got started writing just like from reading and loving what I was reading as a child. Definitely like reading Marvel comic books and mythology. I was a big X-Men fan. Like Wolverine, that was my guy during the early 80s, definitely. So I, and I was a big fan of like Tolkien and The Hobbit as well. So as I got older, I started like reading Stephen King and I was really loving that. And I just, I knew I wanted to do that. And then I had a friend that turned me on to Octavia Butler. I had never heard of her. I didn't know who Octavia Butler was, but my friend was like, well, if you like Stephen King, you'll love this. This is a black woman who writes this type of work. And when I read Octavia Butler, it just opened me up because I really recognize those urban communities and those sceneries. And I really, really loved how she mixed not only the fantasy, but she mixed human emotion and the politics as well. So the politics that takes place like between people, like relationships between people, right? That's very prevalent in her work. I would say that's kind of how I got started. Now, I'm gonna go into something else, okay? So I did all that, right? And I'm you. And I'm here, I'm you, right? A writer, right? I did all of that. I'm reading, giving myself time. I'm really trying to like, you know, make my work, like, you know, I'm talking to a friend, right? I sit down and it sucks, right? The writing, it sucks, right? So what do I do? Well, you know, I kept reading. And what I found out was that when you sit down to write, it always sucks or more often than not, a few people can sit down and get that story right on the first time. Most writers, the writers that I love, the writers that we all love, it takes them many, many drafts. By the time we see the story, they've rewritten it at least 50 times. And that's probably before it even gets to an editor. After the editor, they may have written it another 50 times, right? So it goes back to something I read from Stephen King on writing, right, that basically said, writing is rewriting. But I also think when I took my first writing class, there's this book that they teach in all the programs of, it's called The Art of Fiction. And one of the main things that I took from that book was this. It said, half the books in the library are terrible. You might as well write yours too, right? So you might as well write yours because there are a lot of people who wrote books that, you know, they're just there, right? So what I'm trying to say is in another way, right? From what everyone else has said is that your voice counts, your voice matters. But the thing is, especially for new writers, don't let that period where you sit down and it doesn't look like you wanted to look, don't let that stop you. Write through that and be brave enough to share it with some people who you trust to tell you what you did wrong. And then go back and work on that and be prepared to do it all over again. No problem in a story that you can't fix. Just got to put the work in and it's a lot of work. All right, but you can do it. Thank you so much. I love what everyone said. What we want to do now, I want them to personally, our audience to personally get to speak with you all. And so what I'd like, if you will have a comment or you put a comment out, if you could just unmute yourself and then just ask whatever you'd like to any of the writers. And by the way, everyone, you were how I say, how should we say marvelous? You were just wonderful. I love what you had to say. So anyone want to unmute themselves and just ask a question? Well, I'll ask a question. I'm Rick. Very much enjoyed this. Thank you, Dr. McMillan. That was amazing. My first question was, I read in the chat was about, the authors that influenced you. And I think Danian was just saying, Octavia Butler. And I, another question I asked was, is there a book that you recommend by Herbie? Because all the authors you said that influenced you is also what I'd been reading. So I think I might be interested in that. But just in general, thank you guys. This has been such an amazing talk. Like I thought I was gonna be here for maybe 10 minutes and I'm here still listening and I wanted to know more and hear more. So thank you for that for SFPL, bring this on and I really appreciate it. Anyone? Authors that influenced you, yes. Oh, sure. I can jump in here. So I was, one of the ones that I grew up with most frequently was Brian Nysay's name all the time. You see the Jakes or Jacques, unfortunately he passed away several years ago, but he wrote the Redwall series, if anybody's ever heard of that one. That was a big, big deal for me as a kid just because I hadn't seen a children's novel series that was taken so seriously and it wasn't written down to us. It was very intelligent and complicated and there was this whole lore behind it and just dozens of really interesting, vibrant characters and it really, really made me wanna write when I was a kid just because it, like I said, I couldn't have been, I think I read all the way up through, probably middle school or so and the books go past that point, but that was a big deal for me because it was one of the first times I had seen such mature subject matter written about, but then it also still had a lot of fun and really creative aspects that were drawn to it. So I think that's something that, again, like I said, I think especially if it's someone who wants to go into writing for either children or for middle grade, it's excellent work. It's really, really, really good and it's not something that, oh, you can only enjoy it if you're a kid. No, you can definitely enjoy it as an adult. And then the other thing I'll do is a little bit off the beaten path instead of like a strict novel or non-fiction writer, Dwayne McDuffie and the entire writing team for the Justice League Animated Series and Batman the Animated Series, big, big, big, big influence when I was a kid. I was blown away. You see this? I don't know if you guys can see it. That's my Batman tattoo. I got it because of Batman the Animated Series. That series is outstanding. And it's another example of, like I said, just don't talk down to kids, they're not done. They can understand all of these things that you talk about. And that's been the legacy of Batman the Animated Series as well as the other DCAU series is that they brought all of these great things from the comics and then they came up with new stuff. Like a lot of people don't know that Harley Quinn came from Batman the Animated Series. She was not in anything until they introduced her there. And right now she's all the rage. But I was one of those nerds that knew about her back when I was like 11 years old. And I was like, Harley's so cool. Not in like, I thought she was fascinating. But yes, if anybody has not looked those up, they are on HBO Max. And it is really rich storytelling with great characters and really, really good voice on things. So I'll throw that out there as well. Let me jump in right here behind Keoko because she's saying something that we don't talk about enough when it comes to science fiction and fantasy. The comic book superhero roots of it because you're talking about Dwayne McDuffie with the Batman, Tim Universe. I've been following Dwayne McDuffie since Milestone. Milestone comics. Dwayne McDuffie was the very first comic book writer I ever met in my life. I was working for The New York Times as a reporter. They said, what story do you want to write? I said, there's this new black comic book company called Milestone Comics. They deserve a story. And that was my first byline story in The New York Times. Those writers who came out of comics, people like Alex Simmons, who also has a story in Tales of Wakanda. People like Derek Dingle. People like Dwayne McDuffie who took his comic book work from DC in Marvel and took it to television and wrote one of the first DC animated movies. Dwayne McDuffie, it was an awesome writer. Unfortunately, he passed away, but he was an awesome writer. Check out some of the work that's being done by black comic book writers right now. We all know Tana Hasey-Coats wrote Black Panther, but look at John Ridley. Look at what he's doing right now. Look at the work that's being done by Christopher Priest. You have all of these great African-American writers working in the comic field. You want to be inspired, look at some of them too. And I'll throw one more on my, we jokingly call him my stepdad is Joff Thorn. He's currently the, yeah, I was gonna say, I figured you knew, of course, cause he's wonderful. He has done the, he's right now, he's writing Green Lantern, but he also did the animated Black Panther series. If anybody's seen that, he's like the show runner for that. So he's another person I highly recommend. Rick, you brought up so much. Thank you for your words. Anyone else, would you like to say something, Glyn, Sheree, Danny and anyone, any thoughts on this? Sure. I started reading science fiction, I guess when I was about nine or 10. And one of the first science fiction writers was Andre Norton. And I didn't even think that, I think about her being a female, it just never occurred to me. But I had my first introduction to science fiction, Andre Norton was the first one that I ever read, Operation Time Search, Larry Niven's Flight of the Horse, Anne McCaffrey's The Dragons of Pern, Dragon Riders of Pern, Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Robot series, and then of course, Frank Herbert. But when I began to write, I discovered Octavia Butler and I was just, it was just different from anything I'd seen. And what struck me was those beautiful short sentences that she painted with. And she literally painted with these short, four or five word sentences, sometimes three word sentences and she just string them together. And your mind just saw everything that she was putting on the page. It was just amazing. And when I got a chance to actually meet her, I was astounded. And I will say one other thing, and this pertains to Cherie. Back in 1997, I'd met Octavia Butler and at that time it was Octavia Butler, Chip Delaney and they were the only two acknowledged and Steve Barnes, who was the husband of Tenerife Dew were the only three acknowledged black science fiction writers for the general science fiction community. And I thought that that was a travesty. I says, you can't possibly tell me that there are only three people, three black people who are writing science fiction. So I had the notion to put together an anthology that I was gonna call Dark Stars of the Constellation Diaspora. And I actually got a few writers to acknowledge that. I only wrote to the people I thought could write it. I wrote to every black actor who had ever been in a science fiction movie. And unfortunately I didn't have a great editor, didn't have a great publishing powerhouse behind me. But thank God for Cherie Renny Thomas who put together Dark Matter in 2000. And she did what I had hoped to do, but she did it right. And I thank you for that gift to the community, Cherie. Thank you. You know, we don't have a lot of time. Now we could talk for hours, but I want you all to just go around and say what you're doing next so that our audience can look out for your work, whether it's going to DragonCon or writing a new book. Can we start with you, Jesse? Well, I have given the answer I just gave, I gave, it wouldn't surprise anybody to know that I'm dipping my toe in the comic book world. So I have a couple of comic books out with DC Comics right now, Superman, Red and Blue number three, where I wrote the lead story about Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. I have another comic book coming out from, that came out from DC called Heritage and their represent series. I have another project that I can't announce just yet, but hopefully in the next couple of weeks I can shout from the rooftops about it. So keep your our ears open. I can't wait for everyone to hear about it. Tioca, what are you doing next? So I'm currently writing book five in my Of Cinder and Bone series, which is a contemporary fantasy and science fiction series about dragons used to exist. They were hunted to extinction and then these two MIT scientists figure out how to clone them and bring them back for the purpose of conservation and study, not for profit like you would see in something like Jurassic Park. So book five is slated for next year. The other thing I'm working on is with Milton Davis, who was one of the other wonderful writers in Black Panther, Tales of Wakanda. We currently have Cyber Funk Out, which is an anthology, same thing. It's based around Black authors and that's currently for sale on all sales channels. We also have Terminus. Terminus is the same thing. It's all Black writers. It's all science fiction or fantasy stories that are based in the Atlanta area. And same thing, all of these you can find on his website, which I think is mvmedia.com. And then I'm just gonna promote Milton Roe. Anything he's written because he's not here. I just wanted to do a shout out because he's done a lot for several of us and just Black authors in general. So any of his anthologies, I encourage you to pick us up as well. I agree, Milton is wonderful. Cherie, what is your next, what are you working on? Okay, so I'm working on The Trouble of Waters, Tales of the Deep Blue from Third Man Books, co-edited with Troy L. Wiggins and Pan Morgan. So that's coming out. This fall, this year, I've also apparently co-hosting the Hugo Awards. So I'll be here with Michael Older to host the awards ceremony. Apparently I'm going to the World Fantasy Awards too because my fiction collection, Nine Bodies, Stories from an Ancient Future has been nominated for the year's best collection. So I will be there to celebrate Nisi Shaw, who will be a guest of honor as well. I have other projects that I cannot announce yet, but I'm always editing the magazine of fantasy and science fiction. So there is that as well. So, yeah, and I just wanted to say Octavia Butler had told me when I was working on Dark Matter before it even had a name yet that she and Martin Greenberg had attempted to do an anthology of Black science fiction and fantasy. I think it's not the late 70s, early 80s and they were told a resounding no because at the time publishers believed it would just be about race and no one would want to read about Black characters in science fiction and fantasy. So she didn't do that project. So I was really happy when she supported me in doing Dark Matter because it was something she's known for a long time. We did have more than three people that could have participated and contributed to it. So, yeah, so it's a new age now. So very excited about all that. Thank you. Thank you, Cherie. Danian, what's going on with you? Well, like I said before, like, okay, I'm revising my novel, Boy with the Golden Arm and I actually have a couple of excerpts from it that have been published. One excerpt from the novel is that five side fiction. And this excerpt is actually titled after the book. So if you go to Fire Side and you type in Boy with the Golden Arm, it comes right up. It has some really cool illustrations with it from this graffiti artist, Don Remix. He did a really good job on it. And that's sort of like a dystopian hip hop sci-fi story, kind of like gladiator hip hop battles type of thing. All right, so check that out. Check that I got another piece of it, right, called Natural Born Thriller, that if you go to like the New York Live Arts Web site, you can find it there under the Curate in the End of the World art exhibit. Curate in the End of the World, Red Spring. If you go under there, you'll find the other excerpt. And I have some other things going on with the book that I can't talk about. There's all ways of stuff you can't talk about. Then I just published a short story in a magazine of fantasy and science fiction called Dante's Bones in the May, June issue. And that's sort of like an urban sort of science fiction story. And I got another one coming out. I got this other story coming out in Trouble of the Water, Tales of the Deep Blue as well. And a couple other things. So I'm really like trying to like push these little, these pieces from my novel as I get it together. So yeah, please. You're busy. Okay, finally, Glenn, thank you. Thank you, Damien. Finally, Glenn, what's going on with you? What's happening next with you? Well, I'm excited to tell you about Dragon's Air, Eat Food Legacy, which is gonna be published by Outland Entertainment early next year. It's about a people who evolved alongside the dinosaurs. They were not lizards. They were not quite birds. They weren't mammals. They were very different. And it's about their return. I'm writing the prequel to that and the sequel to that. But that book will be coming out in the spring, I think, or late winter of next year. So I'm very excited about that. And Damien just gave me some great ideas about excerpts. I may want to put some of those out there. But that's my next. And I've got a few things in the mystery murder field that are gonna be coming out too, I hope so. And you'll be a dragon con? I will be a dragon con. Mr. Lou Gossett Jr. is gonna make an appearance. He's known for, of course, roots and officer and a gentleman, but also Enemy Mind, a story about xenophobia that was written in the mid-80s and Watchman, the series that was on HBO. He's got a long history of so many movies. He's done over a hundred movies. And he likes to talk about some of this and about some of the travails of an African-American actor through the 60s, 70s, 80s and current days. Well, thank you so much, all of you. Can we get our, like, our sister? Linda Addison, are you still here, Linda? Yeah, we want you to say something, to say hi to us. She's like our sister. Oh my God, you're making me come on without makeup. All right. Linda! Hey, family! What's up? Like, how's the family? Yes, we are like a Wakanda family, Wakanda forever. But we want to all thank you. We want to thank our sister, Linda, for being here. We want to thank the library, the San Francisco Public Library. They are hearts, they have hearts of gold. Every single one of them. John Smalley, Anissa Malady. Sean is not here, but a wonderful young person named Natalie also worked with us today. We are appreciative of all of you. We feel very lucky to be here and thank you so much. And we want to thank our audience. You guys are wonderful. I'm reading the messages. Couldn't have had a better audience. Just a remarkable, beautiful spirits. Thank you so much for being here. And so I guess we're out of time. We ran a little over. Thank you San Francisco Library. Thank you very much. I want to thank all of our wonderful authors. That was quite amazing. And the wonderful audience, thanks for asking such remarkable questions, thought provoking also to our friends in YouTube land. Those of you that live in San Francisco, drop by the main library. We have an exhibit of science fiction authors over the last 100 years up until October on the third floor, SF by the Bay. Check it out. You can also watch this recording on YouTube, today's event in the future. The link is on the page. It's in the chat. It's also just on our event page at sfpl.org. Thank you everyone. Have a great rest of your weekend. Take care.