About the Butler Scholarship
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship enables writers of color to attend one of the Clarion writing workshops, where Octavia got her start. It furthers Octavia’s legacy by providing the same experience/opportunity that Octavia had to future generations of new writers of color. In addition to her stint as a student at the original Clarion Writers Workshop in Pennsylvania in 1970, Octavia taught several times for Clarion West in Seattle, Washington, and Clarion in East Lansing, Michigan, giving generously of her time to a cause she believed in.
The first Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarships were awarded in the summer of 2007, and they have been awarded annually each subsequent year at the conclusion of the Clarion and Clarion West Workshops. As of the summer of 2018, 21 Butler Scholarships have been awarded.
In order to become a Butler Scholar you should first apply to one or both of the Clarion Workshops, noting on your application(s) that you wish to be considered. Applications are accepted from December of the year preceding the workshops till March of the workshop year. If you are accepted as a workshop student, your application materials will be forwarded to the scholarship’s selection committee. To learn more about these workshops, visit the Clarion website and the Clarion West website.
Our goal for a fully endowed scholarship fund is $100,000. We welcome your tax deductible gift of any amount to this fund. Please use the button to the right of the page to donate via PayPal or a major credit card. If you’d prefer to make your donation in the form of a check or money order, please make it payable to “The Carl Brandon Society” and note that it is for “The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund.” Then mail your donation to:
The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund
c/o The Carl Brandon Society
P.O. Box 23336
Seattle, WA 98102
Octavia E. Butler
Octavia E. Butler (1947 – 2006) was a brilliant African American writer who broke barriers with her courageous and profoundly truthful books and stories. Winner of many awards including a MacArthur Fellowship, and speculative fiction’s highest honors, the Hugo and the Nebula, Octavia was greatly loved during her lifetime and will be greatly missed.
The Fund Administration
The Fund is being administered by the Carl Brandon Society because its mission is consistent with one of the Society’s primary goals: increasing the representation of people of color in the fantastical genres such as science fiction, fantasy and horror. In addition, Octavia was an early member of the Carl Brandon Society. We are a nonprofit organization, and donations made to the fund will be tax deductible. To learn more about the Carl Brandon Society, please read our Mission Statement and visit our site’s other pages.
Questions about the scholarship fund can be sent to:
oebscholarship[at]carlbrandon.org
Octavia E. Butler Scholars
Christopher Caldwell, Clarion West 2007
Christopher Caldwell is a queer Black American living abroad in Glasgow, Scotland. His work has appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Fiyah among others. He is an Ignyte Awards finalist, Clarion West Alumnus, and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. He is @seraph76 on twitter.
Shweta Narayan, Clarion 2007
Shweta Narayan was born in India, has lived in Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California, and feels kinship with shapeshifters and other liminal beings. Their short fiction and poetry have appeared in places like Lightspeed, Transcendent 3, Tor.com, and Strange Horizons.
Shweta’s been mostly dead since 2010, but they have a few pieces in the works again.
Mary Elizabeth Burroughs, Clarion 2008
Mary Elizabeth Burroughs was born and raised in Florida, which means she is just as strange and chaotic as you would expect her to be. She now lives with her young sons in Sydney, Australia and teaches English to high school students. A graduate of Clarion Writers’ Workshop at UC San Diego, she also attended University of Mississippi’s MFA program where she was a John and Renée Grisham Fellow. Her published work has appeared in Black Static, Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, and Bloodchildren: Stories by the Octavia E. Butler Scholars.
Caren Gussoff Sumption, Clarion West 2008
Caren Gussoff Sumption is a SF writer of Jewish and Romany ancestry, living near Seattle, WA. The author of five books and more than 100 short stories, Caren Gussoff Sumption’s been awarded a Hedgebrook Elizabeth George Award, the Speculative Literature Foundation’s Gulliver Grant, a stint as the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Geek of the Week, and honors from the European Commission on Science and Society. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2008, was the Carl Brandon Society’s Octavia E. Butler Scholar at Clarion West. Her latest books are The Birthday Problem (Pink Narcissus Press, 2014) Three Songs For Roxy (Aqueduct Press, 2015), and her novella, “The Women,” in Rise of the Beast (Abbadon/Rebellion, 2018).
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz, Clarion West 2009
Rochita Loenen-Ruiz is a Filipinx writer currently living with her children in The Netherlands. She has worked as a teacher, a musician and a shopkeeper. Her short fiction and her columns have been published in a number of publications. She now works as a freelance writing coach and was the leader of the 2020 Envisioning Other Futures Workshop which was held in Amsterdam. She is working on a novel.
Kai Ashante Wilson, Clarion 2010
Kai Ashante Wilson was the 2010 Octavia Butler scholar at the Clarion writing workshop in San Diego. He won the Crawford award for best first novel of 2016, and his works have been shortlisted for the Hugo, Nebula, Shirley Jackson, Theodore Sturgeon, Locus, and World Fantasy awards. Most of his stories can be read, gratis, at Tor.com. His novellas The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps and A Taste of Honey have received wide critical acclaim. Kai Ashante Wilson lives in New York City.
Erik Owomoyela, Clarion West 2010
Erik Owomoyela is an editor and writer specializing in cynical futurism and technical fantasy. Before attending Clarion West, he worked in journalism and wrote short plays; afterward he managed a TV news website and wrote an animated miniseries.
Dennis Y. Ginoza, Clarion 2011
Dennis Y. Ginoza‘s work has appeared in Shimmer, Phantom Drift: A Journal of New Fabulism, and Prime Number Magazine. He lives and works on the Kitsap peninsula of Washington State.
akopos.net
Jeremy Sim, Clarion West 2011
Jeremy is a writer, teacher, and software engineer. Thanks to the Carl Brandon Society, he attended Clarion West in 2011, and has had over a dozen short stories published since. He likes music, electric skateboards, animated movies, and dumb word jokes. He lives quietly in the Bay Area, writing and pondering in an infinite loop.
Lisa Bolekaja, Clarion 2012
Indrapramit Das, Clarion West 2012
Indrapramit Das (aka Indra Das) is a writer and editor from Kolkata, India. He is a Lambda Literary Award-winner for his debut novel The Devourers (Penguin India / Del Rey), and a Shirley Jackson Award-winner for his short fiction, which has appeared in a variety of anthologies and publications including Tor.com, Slate Magazine, Clarkesworld and Asimov’s Science Fiction. He has lived in India, the United States, and Canada, where he received his MFA from the University of British Columbia.
indradas.com
Sophia Echavarria, Clarion 2013
Geetanjali Dighe Vandemark, Clarion West 2013
Geetanjali Vandemark was born and raised in India and now lives on Bainridge Island, WA, where she is working on her debut novel. She is a graduate of Clarion West Writers Workshop, 2013. Her story “Voice of Gravaar” was one of the winners of the Octavia E. Butler-inspired flash fiction contest ‘Door to a Pink Universe,’ held by Seattle Library. Her story “The Last Standing Man” was published in the anthology Stories for Chip, to honor Samuel Delany. She has been published in Daily Science Fiction and Nature.
Amin Chehelnabi, Clarion 2014
Amin Chehelnabi is an Australian-born gay Iranian with a strong interest in the speculative fiction field. He has been a Collection/Anthology Judge for the Aurealis Awards, and a First Reader for Lightspeed Magazine. His publications include a horror story published with Innsmouth Free Press (2014), which received an Honorable Mention in The Best Horror of the Year, Volume Seven (Edited by Ellen Datlow), and a forthcoming climate change story with World Weaver Press (2021). He was a panelist for a three-day conference called Shaping Change: Remembering Octavia E. Butler through Archives, Art, and Worldmaking, which took place at the Cross-Cultural Center at UC San Diego (2016). He also has a Bachelor’s Degree in Fine Arts, majoring in sculpture, and loves cats.
Chinelo Onwualu, Clarion West 2014
I am a Nigerian writer and editor living in Toronto. I’m the non-fiction editor of Anathema Magazine, and co-founder of Omenana, a magazine of African Speculative Fiction. I’m also former chief spokesperson for the African Speculative Fiction Society. My short stories have been featured in Slate.com, Uncanny Magazine, and Strange Horizons, as well as in several anthologies including the award-winning New Suns: Original Speculative Fiction from People of Colour. Follow me on Twitter @chineloonwualu.”
Melanie West, Clarion 2015
Mimi Mondal, Clarion West 2015
Mimi Mondal was born and raised in Kolkata, India. Her novelette “His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light” was a finalist for for the Nebula Award in 2020, and her co-edited anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler received the Locus Award and was a finalist for the Hugo and British Fantasy Awards in 2018. Mimi was formerly an editor with Penguin Random House India and Uncanny Magazine, and occasionally writes the column “Extraordinary Alien” on Hindustan Times, focusing on politics, culture, technology and futures. She currently lives in New York, where she works as a freelance editor and enjoys the company of monsters in a socially distanced manner.
Kathleen Kayembe, Clarion 2016
Kathleen Kayembe is the Octavia E. Butler Scholar from Clarion’s class of 2016, with stories in Lightspeed, Nightmare, and several Best of the Year anthologies; an essay in the Hugo-nominated anthology Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E. Butler; and previous publications with Less Than Three Press. She writes romance as Kaseka Nvita and lives on Twitter as @mkkayembe. A longtime member of the St. Louis Writers Guild, you can find her in St. Louis running virtual Amherst Writers and Artists writing groups, kicking off virtual writing sprints and watch parties, writing in notebooks just so she can use a fountain pen, and playing obnoxiously sensible RPG characters who won’t let party members die.
https://www.kathleenkayembe.com/
S. Qiouyi Lu, Clarion West 2016
Qiouyi Lu writes, translates, and edits between two coasts of the Pacific. Ær work has appeared in several award-winning venues. Æ edits the magazine Arsenika and runs microverses, a hub for tiny narratives. You can find out more about S. at ær website s.qiouyi.lu or on Twitter @sqiouyilu.
Macky Cruz, Clarion 2017
Macky Cruz is a technical writer focusing on cybersecurity. She writes near-future or present-day speculative fiction set in the Philippines featuring primarily Filipino characters. In her professional capacity, she has helped develop papers, spoken in international conferences, and conducted trainings about current and emerging digital threats. She is also an advocate of teaching good digital citizenship to kids and families and has created related programs and content and volunteered in teaching internet safety to kids in the provinces. She is currently based in Marikina. To relax, she plays video games, reads and watches mostly non-fiction and science fiction, and teaches herself easy songs on the guitar.
Stephanie Malia Morris, Clarion West 2017
Stephanie Malia Morris is a graduate of the 2017 Clarion West Writers Workshop, recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Award, and a 2019 Kimbilio Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in FIYAH, Pseudopod, Nightmare, Apex Magazine, and Lightspeed. She has narrated short fiction for the Escape Artists podcasts, Uncanny, and Beneath Ceaseless Skies. You can find her online at stephaniemaliamorris.com or on Twitter at @smaliamorris.
http://stephaniemaliamorris.com/
Senaa Ahmad, Clarion 2018
Senaa Ahmad’s short fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, PRISM International, Strange Horizons, and Uncanny Magazine. A Clarion 2018 alum, she has received the generous support of the Octavia Butler Scholarship, the inaugural A. C. Bose Grant from the Speculative Literature Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Toronto Arts Council, and the Ontario Arts Council. She’s the recipient of the 2019 Sunburst Award for Short Fiction, and is working concurrently on her first two short story collections.
Dennis E. Staples, Clarion West 2018
Dennis E. Staples is an Ojibwe writer from Bemidji, Minnesota. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with an MFA in fiction. He is a graduate of the 2018 Clarion West Writers Workshop and a recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship. He is a citizen of the Red Lake Nation.
Pemi Aguda, Clarion 2019
Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. She is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and an Emerging Writer fellowship from Aspen Summer Words. Her novel manuscript won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award, and she currently has a Miami Book Fair Fiction fellowship.
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas, Clarion West 2019
Nelly Geraldine García-Rosas is a Mexican immigrant and a graduate of the Clarion West class of 2019. Her short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Clarkesworld, Nightmare, and anthologies like The Apex Book of World SF 3 and She Walks in Shadows. She can be found at nellygeraldine.com and on Twitter as @kitsune_ng.
Lue Palmer, Clarion West 2021
Lue Palmer is an environmental fiction writer and multi-media journalist based in New Orleans. Their work has been awarded the Journey Prize for fiction, and the Lynton Prize for Book Writing from Columbia University, among other awards. They are a proud recipient of the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Award and alumni of the Clarion West workshop. Their first novel, The Hungry River, is forthcoming.
Shakirah Peterson, Clarion West 2021
Shingai Kagunda, Clarion 2022
Wen-Yi Lee, Clarion West 2022
Naomi Day, Clarion West 2022
Osahon Ize-Iyamu, Clarion 2023
Osahon Ize-Iyamu is a Nigerian writer whose work explores the intersection of fear, faith, and the fantastical. His work utilizes oral storytelling traditions, unconventional structures, gist, and superstition, to showcase the complexities of non-Western reality. He is an alumnus of the Alpha Young Writers workshop, and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. His work has published in magazines such as The Rumpus, Strange Horizons, Clarkesworld, Reckoning and Lightspeed Magazine. He is the recipient of a MacDowell fellowship and has spoken about his work at AWP, Story Hour, and Berlin’s Climate Culture Festival. You can find him online @osahon4545.
Kiran Kaur Saini, Clarion West 2023
Anselma Widha Pridhanta, Clarion 2024
Tanisha Tekriwal, Clarion West 2024