“We are already dreaming beyond this current moment, these crises, these norms. Dreams are the foundation for what we attempt to turn into reality. . . . When we know things need to change, dreaming together is one of the places we can start."
adrienne maree brown, Foreword to Afterglow
For the 2023-2024 academic year, Community Reads will be focusing on the book Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors, an anthology of visionary fiction about climate justice. However, instead of reading a new short story this quarter, our programming will focus on our Climate Fiction Writing Awards. The awards submission form opened on February 20th and will remain open until Earth Day, April 22nd, and is open to all UW Bothell and Cascadia students. There will be prizes for the winning stories and for the first ten submissions! We want to use these awards to promote student writing and the use of visionary fiction as a tool to imagine a more environmentally just future for our region.
We have spent the last two quarters reading visionary climate fiction written by others and discussing our questions, our appreciations, and our frustrations with other people’s stories. This quarter, we plan to move into a more creative space, to apply this tool of visionary fiction to our own imaginations and our own community. We want our community not only to read, but also to share our visions of a better future. We want to know what kinds of worlds you are dreaming, and we want to give you space to share them with us.
This quarter, we will be hosting two different writing events, one at the UWB Diversity Center and one at the Cascadia Diversity & Equity Center. Please read below for more information about these events and how you can participate. These events will serve as scaffolding for your submissions to our writing awards.
If you are not a student but would still like to explore visionary fiction as a tool for imagining climate futures, please feel free to submit your work to our Community Reads Visionary Fiction Anthology, an open digital collection of visionary fiction written by our community. View the Share page for more information about open work and submissions.
When our awards submissions close and winners are selected, we also plan to hold a celebration open to our community members! Watch this space for more information to come.
Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors by
Afterglow is a stunning collection of original short stories in which writers from many different backgrounds envision a radically different climate future. Published in collaboration with Grist, a nonprofit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions, these stirring tales expand our ability to imagine a better world. Afterglow draws inspiration from a range of cutting-edge literary movements including Afrofuturism, hopepunk, and solarpunkgenres that uplift equitable climate solutions and continued service to ones community, even in the face of despair. The Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, disabled, feminist, and queer voices in this collection imagine intersectional worlds in which no community is left behind. Whether through abundance or adaptation, reform, or a new understanding of survival, these stories offer flickers of hope, even joy, as they provide a springboard for exploring how fiction can help create a better reality.Afterglow welcomes a diverse range of new voices into the climate conversation to envision the next 180 years of equitable climate progress. A creative work rooted in the realities of our present crisis, Afterglow presents a new way to think about the climate emergencyone that blazes a path to a clean, green, and more just future.
Read all of the short stories in the collection, including Afterglow, on the Grist website.
Access the ebook through King County Library System or Seattle Public Library
Buy the book at Third Place Books or the University Bookstore
Listen to seven of the stories, including Afterglow, on the Grist website.
Contact members of the team via email with questions, comments, or concerns:
Join us at the UW Bothell Diversity Center for a writing workshop facilitated by phoenix vaughan-ende, a student in the UWB MFA program. You will have a chance to see some examples of visionary fiction, explore prompts and possibilities in your own writing, and discuss visionary worlds with other students. Snacks provided!
Date: Thursday, April 4th
Time: 12:00-1:30 PM
Location: IDEA Project, UW1-161
Drop into a casual session at the Cascadia Diversity & Equity Center to enjoy snacks, share space with community members, and read and/or write climate fiction. We will have prompts, books, tea, and food available for a cozy event, and will be available to provide guidance on the writing awards.
Date: Wednesday, April 10th
Time: 11:00 AM-12:00 PM
Location: Cascadia Diversity & Equity Center, CC1-002
During the 2022-2023 academic year, the Community Reads team created an open digital anthology site to welcome submissions of visionary fiction from our community members. This year, we will build on that site for submissions of visionary fiction with an environmental justice lens. Inspired by the short stories in Afterglow, we encourage you to imagine your own futures and submit your own visionary writing to our site, contributing to a community repository of shared dreams and radical imagination.
To learn more about this project, how to submit, and what open work is, please visit the “Share” page of the site. We hope you will feel inspired to write some visionary work of your own or be inspired by your fellow community members' submissions.
Afterglow: Climate Fiction for Future Ancestors edited by Grist with a foreword by adrienne maree brown. E-book available in the UW Libraries catalog. UW NetID required for access (for Cascadia community members who do not have a NetID, please visit the CC Computing Services NetID website to get started).
We will not be reading a new chapter of this book this quarter, but we recommend the stories and the foreword by adrienne maree brown.
“adrienne maree brown grows healing ideas in public through her multi-genre writing, her music and her podcasts. Informed by 25 years of movement facilitation, somatics, Octavia E Butler scholarship and her work as a doula, adrienne has nurtured Emergent Strategy, Pleasure Activism, Radical Imagination and Transformative Justice as ideas and practices for transformation. She is the author/editor of seven published texts and the founder of the Emergent Strategy Ideation Institute, where she is now the writer-in-residence.” (from https://adriennemareebrown.net/book-me/)
“Grist is a nonprofit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Our goal is to use the power of storytelling to illuminate the way toward a better world, inspire millions of people to walk that path with us, and show that the time for action is now.” (from https://grist.org/about/)
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