Susana Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and was most recently the Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan.

She is the author of CLOSE KIN AND DISTANT RELATIVES: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature, co-editor, with Brittney C. Cooper and Robin M. Boylorn, of THE CRUNK FEMINIST COLLECTION, and co-author, with Brittney C. Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, of the young adult handbook FEMINIST AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood.

She is the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective and has written for Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com and Ebony.com, and has also been featured on NPR and the BBC, and in Essence and the New York Times.

Books by Susana M. Morris

Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler

by Susana M. Morris - Biography, Nonfiction

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity --- our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project --- the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut (made possible by chattel slavery) to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. In POSITIVE OBSESSION, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social and historical context that shaped her life.