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In June, 2006, the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle will donate 20% of their proceeds from the sale of certain books to the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund of the Carl Brandon Society. Books must be purchased in person or over the phone, during the month of June. Online purchases do not qualify.

The donation will be made as part of Elliott Bay’s “Books for a Change” program. Titles for June include Dark Matter II, edited by Sheree Renee Thomas; Fledgling and Kindred by Octavia E. Butler; The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan; Cinnamon Kiss, The Wave, and Fear Itself by Walter Mosley; Zorro and City of Beasts by Isabelle Allende; and many, many more.

For a complete list of the books that are part of the June donation program, please call the store at (206) 624-6600 or (toll free) 1-800-962-5311, or check the online list. Then, either place an order for any of these books over the phone, or buy any of them at the store to make your selection count towards the bookstore’s total donation.

The Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship Fund will support writers of color attending the Clarion and Clarion West Writing Workshops, beginning in 2007. It is administered by the Carl Brandon Society, a nonprofit organization focusing on the presence and representation of people of color in the fantastic literary genres. For more information about the Carl Brandon Society and the scholarship fund, please visit their website.

Sheree Renee Thomas blogs about the recent tribute to Octavia E. Butler at the New York Public Library.

The evening offered many jewels, too many to jot all down here, ranging from heartfelt testimony, illuminating and hilarious anecdotes, a couple of bizarre moments (oh, we are human, ain’t we!), some fyah performances from Sonia Sanchez and Avery Brooks (Good Lawd!), and rousing musicmakin’ from Toshi and Bernice Johnson Reagon that could only make Octavia smile.

(Illustration by Sukumar Ray, for one of his own books)

I was reading randomly in The Vintage Book of Modern Indian Literature, and I came across Sukumar Ray, a highly prolific writer of surrealist children’s stories in the 1910s and 20s. He was part of the Presidency College circle of Bengali intellectuals in Calcutta, and he was the father of acclaimed film maker Satyajit Ray.

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