Specter: A Tumblr

The Last Bookstore

A few months ago, NYC-based Late Night Library interviewed me about my writing life and Specter Magazine. This past week, the interview podcast was released. Check it out!

“How To Hide A Child” by Akwaeke Emezi, in the October issue of Specter. (via spectermagazine)

A pleasure to have published this, one of my favorite stories, for spectermagazine.

Specter, my literary magazine/project/platform, is now open for submissions once again. Submit your poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and visual art today! (or tomorrow if you’re busy today…whenever you like.)

Early Octavia Butler stories coming out in June

(ASSOCIATED PRESS) A pair of recently discovered early stories by prize-winning science fiction author Octavia Butler will be coming out as an e-book in June.

Open Road Integrated Media, a digital publisher, announced Tuesday that “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder” will be compiled in a single volume titled “Unexpected Stories” and will be released June 24. Walter Mosley, the best-selling crime writer, has contributed an introduction.

“’Unexpected Stories’ reveals the themes that would become Butler’s lexicon: the complicating mysteries we assign to power, race, and gender,” Mosley writes. “Reading these tales is like looking at a photograph of a child who you only knew as an adult. In her eyes you can see the woman that you came to know much later; a face, not yet fully formed, that contains the promise of something that is now a part of you; the welcomed surprise of recognition in innocent eyes.”

Butler, who died in 2006 at age 58, was one of the first black science fiction writers to receive mainstream attention and was known for such books as “Bloodchild and Other Stories” and the novel “Parable of the Sower.” She was inducted, posthumously, into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2010.

There was no one moment or source of inspiration. My parents—college-educated—didn’t instill in me a love of reading at an early age. I didn’t gravitate to books, and though I wrote one or two stories as a child, I never thought of “writer” as a thing I might want to do.

All of that is to say, the attraction to literature—editing and writing—has been a slow burn, of sorts. In my teens, I started writing terrible poetry, which became terrible short fiction. I read a book—“Things Fall Apart”—because I actually wanted to for a change…then I read another book, then another, and so on…