Our February Selection

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler

If you’ve been following along with our recent posts, you may have caught a sneak peek from connease into what we’ll be reading this month - Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower.

When we launched 2025 with Emergent Strategy, we planned to read several books in the Emergent Strategy Series over the next few months. But given how prevalent and influential Octavia Butler was for adrienne marie brown in developing the ideas in Emergent Strategy, as well as how prescient Parable of the Sower has continued to be in our current political landscape, we felt this was the perfect way to continue our theme while also going back to some of the fundamental ideas upon which Emergent Strategy is based.

We also know that many of you have probably read Parable of the Sower at some point in your lives, or perhaps even more recently as it’s been mentioned frequently over the past several months. So to change things up a bit, we’ve decided to explore the graphic novel version, which was released in 2020 with the blessing of Octavia Butler’s estate. When we launched Toward Liberation in August 2023, we always envisioned that this would be a space to explore multiple different formats of how the written word has been used across time and genres to advance liberation, but so far we’ve gravitated mostly toward traditional books. So we hope this will be a new and exciting way for all of us to rediscover the brilliance of Octavia Butler and also appreciate all that a graphic novel can bring to a text.

A note of caution as connease mentioned in her earlier post. The graphic novel version can be a bit difficult to find particularly if you’re avoiding Amazon, as we are. It is on backorder at Bookshop but seems to be newly available at Thriftbooks (as of today there are 17 copies available). It is also immediately at eBooks.com (with no shipping costs) if you’re a fan of e-readers.

But in case the Thriftbooks copies run out, connease has sourced a few additional print options here, here, and here. However, we recommend ordering as soon as possible to allow time for shipping because quantities seem to be limited and are going fast! (Also, this is not an exhaustive list. There may be other options.)

We’re really excited about diving into this and we hope you’ll join us! As always, we’ll meet at the end of February to discuss together on zoom. This month’s meeting will take place on February 26 from 6:00 - 7:00 PM Eastern. Use this link to register.

Over the coming weeks, connease, Maya, and I will be sharing a bit more about what Parable of the Sower means to us as we continue moving forward in this new landscape.

Until then, we appreciate each of you. Thank you for being part of our journey!

In solidarity,

Alan