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It is my pleasure and privilege today to introduce Dr. Nnedi Okorafor. Born in the United States to Nigerian immigrants, Nnedi Okorafor grew up traveling between Nigeria and the U.S. Her groundbreaking stories draw on this rich transnational heritage, uniting West African cultural imagery with speculative tropes. Richly imagined, compellingly written, and always thought-provoking, Okorafor's fictions, like her characters, resist the identity categories into which they are sometimes forced. In their re-imagination of social and fictional conventions, her characters and her fictions both vigorously enact the change they want to see in the world.
Since graduating from Clarion in 2001, Okorafor has put many of us to shame with her steady output of innovative novels and short stories. Her short story "Amphibious Green," which received the 2001 Hurston-Wright literary award, provided an early glimpse of Okorafor's knack for stylistic experimentation. A provocative portrait of the development of a young Nigerian-American artist, woven together with the perspectives of her caged frogs, "Amphibious Green" also demonstrated what would become Okorafor's characteristic...