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Susana M. Morris

Biography

Susana M. Morris

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. 

Susana M. Morris

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 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. 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 this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing.