Positive Obsession

Susana Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and was most recently the Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature, co-editor, with Brittney C. Cooper and Robin M. Boylorn, of The Crunk Feminist Collection, and co-author, with Brittney C. Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, of the young adult handbook Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood. She is the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective and has written for Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com and Ebony.com, and has also been featured on NPR and the BBC, and in Essence and the New York Times.

“It's not simply that Positive Obsession brilliantly explores the threads of the life of Octavia Butler; it's the way Susana Morris artfully unwinds this life, creating a kind of almost gothic, futuristic, mystery as much as it is biography. I thought I knew Butler and her work. Morris showed me, in the most profound ways, that I knew neither.”  — Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy: An American Memoir"Susana Morris is a queer Afrofuturist feminist visionary. Her work helps us all to see that new worlds really are possible, and she does it with a signature narrative fierceness that makes you want to work hard to bring that world into existence right now." — Brittney Cooper, author of the NYT bestseller Eloquent Rage“Positive Obsession is the book you should read, re-read, and then read again. Each reading reveals something new about the inimitable Octavia Butler as it unlocks an unexplored dimension of the imagination. Susana Morris masterfully coaxes Butler’s life from the archives, allowing Butler’s brilliance and passion to guide her exploration of culture and craft, power and politics. This is more than a biography of one of the greatest writers to ever put words to page. It is a testament to Black women’s enduring genius. I want to gift this book to every woman in my life!” — Tanisha C. Ford, NAACP Image Award-winning author of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement.Susana Morris' pen is tender, precise, and rich with care. She brings us into the intellectual and emotional world of Butler, tracing the life of a mind that continues to shape our movements for justice and our visions of liberation. Through Morris, Butler is not only made real—she is made eternal. — Dr. Bettina L. Love New York Times Bestselling Author of Punished for Dreaming: How School Reform Harms Black Children and How We Heal.“This book is a gift to all of us who benefit from the deeper understanding we gain of Butler as a visionary artist. Maybe I betray a belief in the time travel and telepathy that are major themes of Butler’s work when I say that Susana Morris’s careful work here is also a gift to Octavia herself. The depth of research and contextual insight in POSITIVE OBSESSION creates a unique biography where Morris not only accompanies the reader through Octavia Butler’s work, lifetime and afterlife, she also offers Octavia the retroactive intimacy and care she always deserved and rarely received.” — Alexis Pauline Gumbs, PhD author of Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde“Drawing on correspondence, interviews, unpublished manuscripts, and archival material, queer Black feminist scholar Morris offers a sensitive examination of pioneering Black science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947-2006)” — Kirkus Reviews“Dr. Susanna Morris presents to us a nuanced and extremely well-researched work that delivers greater insights into the mind and life of one of the most important American writers to ever live. Positive Obsession resonates with the reverberations of Butler’s life and stories and shines with the luminescence of a brand new sun.” — John Jennings, Best-selling Illustrator of Kindred: a graphic novel adaptation“Morris powerfully frames Butler’s work and career through her politics and personal struggles, including the way poverty ‘threatened to crush her spirit.’ The result is a moving study of the life and creative pursuits of a literary pioneer.” — Publishers Weekly"a tender cultural biography of the inimitable Octavia E. Butler...Morris’s prose is devoid of any of the stuffiness of a scholar’s biography and sometimes feels like memoir or fiction...We can, and certainly must, take Butler’s life as inspiration for creating our own resistance." — Chicago Review of Books“My only wish for this empathetic and insightful biography is that it were longer, so I could spend more time in Butler’s, and Morris’s, company.” — 4ColumnsMorris’ earnest exploration is not only fortified by the deep research into Butler’s extensive journals but also provides insightful commentary on the novels and short stories that have cultivated countless devotees... Positive Obsession is as keen in its literary insight as it is an exultant survey of a towering literary figure. — Booklist“The great writer has been gone nearly two decades, but this look at her life will bring her genius back to the forefront. Morris shows how Butler’s work was shaped, and from where her stories sprang. There were always important lessons inside her tales, and they are more relevant now than ever. Read this biography, then go back and enjoy Butler’s work anew.” — Miami Times…the portrait of Butler not simply as a genius, but as a human being riddled with insecurities and despair, is what makes “Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler” by Susana M. Morris such a moving and welcome biography — Washington PostMorris skillfully blends Butler’s difficult and singular story with cogent analyses of how her fiction critiqued—and predicted—late-20th and early-21st-century America (for example, Butler’s 1993 novel, Parable of the Sower, tells the story of a young Black woman in the 2020s whose community is locked in conflict with a tyrannical autocrat while Los Angeles burns). Morris makes pressing political and academic ideas accessible while allowing them to remain as expansive as the universes that Butler explored so brilliantly. That she does so in just a few hundred pages, while losing none of the crucial context of Black feminism, the civil-rights movement, American imperialism, and the Reagan era, is a testament to Morris’s skill as that rare scholar who is also very much a writer. Her own positive obsession with Butler becomes the reader’s great reward. — The Atlantic