Octavia Estelle Butler signing a copy of Fledgling after speaking and answering questions from the audience. The event was part of a promotional tour for the book in October, 2005. [Nikolas Coukouma]
At 9 a.m., All Saints Church features Nikki High, owner of Octavia’s Bookshelf in nearby Altadena, speaking about Juneteenth as part of the day’s celebrations.
Vroman’s Bookstore hosts author Chi-Ming Yang from 3 p.m. to 4 p.m. for a discussion and signing of “Octavia E. Butler: H is for Horse,” which explores Butler’s childhood fascination with horses and marginalized creatures through her unpublished writings and drawings.
In South Pasadena, Octavia’s Solstice is set for 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Essie Justice in South Pasadena. The half-day teach-in, co-hosted by Firebrand Creative House and Essie Justice Group, focuses on wildfire resilience, somatic healing, and navigating interpersonal conflict, with hands-on workshops on natural dyeing and clothing mending.
The City of Pasadena officially proclaimed June 22 as Octavia E. Butler Day in June, honoring the date of Butler’s birth in 1947.
Butler was born June 22, 1947, in Pasadena to Octavia Margaret Guy, a housemaid, and Laurice James Butler, a shoeshiner. Her father died when she was seven years old.
Despite being dyslexic, Butler was an avid reader who spent countless hours at the Pasadena Central Library and La Pintoresca Branch Library. Her mother would drop her off at the library on her way to work because she couldn’t afford to buy books.
At age 10, Butler begged her mother to buy her a Remington typewriter.
Butler also accompanied her mother to her cleaning work, where they were required to enter white people’s houses through back doors.
“I didn’t like seeing her go through back doors. If my mother hadn’t put up with all those humiliations, I wouldn’t have eaten very well or lived very comfortably,” Butler said, discussing her mother’s work as inspiration for writing “Kindred.”
“I began writing about power because I had so little,” Butler once said.
Butler graduated from John Muir High School in 1965 and earned an Associate’s degree from Pasadena City College in 1968, where she won a monetary prize in a short story contest. She published her first science fiction story in 1971 and her debut novel “Patternmaster” in 1976.
Her career earned numerous accolades, including Hugo Awards for “Speech Sounds” in 1984 and “Bloodchild” in 1985. She also won Nebula Awards for “Bloodchild” in 1985 and “Parable of the Talents” in 1998.
In 1995, Butler became the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, earning $295,000. She received the PEN Lifetime Achievement Award in Writing in 2000 and was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2010.
Butler’s novel “Kindred” was selected as Pasadena’s 2006 One City, One Story, though she died before the scheduled author talk at the Pasadena Public Library.
Butler died February 24, 2006, at age 58 outside her Seattle home. She is buried at Mountain View Cemetery in Altadena.
Her papers are housed at the Huntington Library, where they have been the most frequently accessed collection for the past nine years.
“Why aren’t there more SF [science fiction] Black writers? There aren’t because there aren’t. What we don’t see, we assume can’t be,” Butler wrote. “What a destructive assumption.”
Butler’s legacy continues to grow in her hometown. In 2022, her former middle school was renamed Octavia E. Butler Magnet. In February 2023, Octavia’s Bookshelf opened in Pasadena. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory named the Mars Perseverance rover’s touchdown site for Butler.
In 2006, the Carl Brandon Society established the Octavia E. Butler Memorial Scholarship to enable writers of color to attend the Clarion Writers’ Workshop.
Her headstone bears a verse from her novel “Parable of the Sower”: “All that you touch You Change. All that you Change Changes you. The only lasting truth Is Change. God Is Change.”
