 Thanks for coming out today. Thanks for cheers for inviting me to participate. My name is Kwan Booth, and this is an excerpt from the short story I have in the book. It's from a series of magic realism, Afrofuturism, short stories I'm working on that kind of use magical ideas to confront social justice and a lot of the issues that we're facing today. So this is called Live From Planet Woke. On a morning that was remarkable in no other way, the famous sports star stared into the bathroom mirror into his own face and the huge problem hovering above it. A kinky revolution had sprouted atop his head as he slept. A tiny two-inch Afro now stood triumphantly after toppling his close crop Caesar like a corrupt regime. After breaking two sets of clippers and chipping his favorite shears, trying to rid himself of the stubborn scruff, he headed down to breakfast. The news was on. A young woman had been shot by police the night before, and they were processed happening all over the country. The famous sports star ignored the news like he always did, but had to call his wife's name loudly to draw her attention away from the big screen. He complained about the new addition to his profile and worried that it would be taken the wrong way, like some kind of political statement or act of defiance. Indeed, this new face with its black power coils did resemble the pictures of the old activists he'd seen in the books his wife was always reading. Books with titles that promised of uprisings and critical examinations of things that the famous sports star had either taken for granted or never fully understood. His wife listened to his concerns and told him that he was overreacting, that it was probably just temporary. And besides, if some people were rattled by a little something like this, then those people needed to have their coattails pulled to the ways of the world that they were living in. The famous sports star trusted his wife and knew that she had a much better grasp on these things. So he sighed with heavy breath, pulled his jersey over his head with a bit more difficulty than usual and headed out to practice. By the end of the month, this mini fro had blown out into a perfect 12 inch sphere and a short beard and goatee has sprouted up to match. He'd begun to resemble some of the men on his father's side with their oak skin and draws that stretched clear back to Mississippi. The ones that the Godfrey and Catholics on his mother's side didn't like very much. Once his fro reached two feet in length, certain friends said that they were shocked and slightly dismayed that he decided to play the race card. At three feet, photos of the star and his new hairstyle would leak to the media. Sports commentators and pundits denounced his actions and questioned his allegiances. By the time his afro topped four feet in circumference, the town where he'd grown up, which happened to have more churches per capita than any city in the United States was torn in two. At the local pizza parlor where he used to work, someone painted a Hitler mustache on his portrait right before someone else covered it in kisses. Someone else hung a mannequin with an afro from the oak tree in front of the house where he'd grown up. By the time the season rolled around, the sports star's afro was the size of the state of Virginia, and there was no way that he could play this season, which suited him just fine. At his wife's encouragement, he'd begun reading the stacks of books that she'd placed strategically around the house, and the more he read, the more the protests erupting around the country started to resonate. He'd taken to spend the majority of his time with his wife and the growing movement of people who'd begun to gather around him. It was like his hair had his own gravitational pull, as people from all over the world were drawn to the man with the planet-sized afro. Before long, the afro eclipsed all of the West Coast, and some of the more adventurous had begun to climb to its peak, scaling the sides to hike across the wide expanse in order to see the world from a new perspective. They discovered that the kinky curls were excellent for growing crops. A little digging revealed networks of underground freshwater streams. Carpenters sheared off long planks of the dense curls to build libraries and schools, and more and more people began to join. The famous sports star's wife was elected to oversee the development. Villages began popping up on the hairy horizon and small houses and customs and names that reflected the names of the people began to show. At press conferences, when he was asked about the development community and what he was hoping to accomplish, the famous now-former sports star said that he was just doing his part to create the world that we all wanted to see. We're just trying to be our best selves, he said, staying right into the cameras and the flashing bulbs. We believe that it's time to build a world where that can happen. And high above them, the sound of hammers and working drifted down to the press conference, the sound of children and singing soon followed as the promise of something better floated just above them all, between the ground and the sky, living and clearly visible to anyone with the courage to just look up. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.