Teaching Black Speculative Fiction

Teaching Black Speculative Fiction: Equity, Justice, and Antiracism edited by KaaVonia Hinton and Karen Michele Chandler offers innovative approaches to teaching Black speculative fiction (e.g., science fiction, fantasy, horror) in ways that will inspire middle and high school students to think, talk, and write about issues of equity, justice, and antiracism. The book highlights texts by seminal authors such as Octavia E. Butler and influential and emerging authors, including Nnedi Okorafor, Kacen Callender, B. B. Alston, Tomi Adeyemi, and Bethany C. Morrow.

Each chapter in Teaching Black Speculative Fiction:

• introduces a Black speculative text and its author,


• describes how the text engages with issues of equity, justice, and/or antiracism,


• explains and describes how one theory or approach helps elucidate the key text?s concern with equity, justice, and/or antiracism, and


• offers engaging teaching activities that encourage students to read the focal text; that facilitate exploration of the text and a theoretical lens or critical approach; and that guide students to consider ways to extend the focus on equity, justice, and/or antiracism to action in their own lives and communities.

"The editors KaaVonia Hinton and Karen M. Chandler have gathered an engaging book with voices that affirm and advance the teaching of Black speculative texts. Most importantly, they honor the creative minds of authors who contribute to young people's literature and scholarship of our colleagues in Black literary criticism. Their book is already groundbreaking in the areas of antiracism and justice and as an essential guide and reference for our current generation of readers and scholars and those in the making, too."

R. Joseph Rodríguez, St. Edward's University, Austin, Texas, former editor, English Journal

"Teaching Black Speculative Fiction is an indispensable tool that echoes the imaginative cosmology of the genre, providing educators with thoughtful applications to explore the rhetorical functions of speculative fiction as a critical literary analysis tool to understand and actively resist systemic racism and injustice."

Roberta Price Gardner, Kennesaw State University