Hub City Bookshop: Nnedi Okorafor and Jeff VanderMeer

Shared Worlds, a unique summer writing camp for rising eighth- through 12th-graders, takes place July 17-30 at Wofford College. Faculty writers will read their works over 2 evenings at the Hub City Bookshop.

Join us Wednesday July 20 for Jeff VanderMeer and Nnedi Okorafor.

Jeff VanderMeer is the 2016-2017 Trias Writer-in-Residence for Hobart-William Smith College. His most recent fiction is the NYT-bestselling Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, and Acceptance), which won the Shirley Jackson Award and Nebula Award. The trilogy made over 30 year’s best lists, including Entertainment Weekly’s top 10, and prompted the New Yorker to call the author “the weird Thoreau.” The trilogy has been acquired by publishers in 28 other countries, with Paramount Pictures acquiring the movie rights. VanderMeer’s nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Atlantic.com, and the Los Angeles Times. He has taught at the Yale Writers’ Conference and the Miami International Book Fair, lectured at MIT, Brown, and the Library of Congress. His forthcoming novel from Farrar, Straus and Giroux is titled Borne. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida, with his wife, the noted editor Ann VanderMeer.

The American-born daughter of Igbo Nigerian parents, Nnedi Okorafor has been visiting Nigeria since she was very young. Her novels and stories reflect both her West African heritage and her American life. Okorafor is a 2001 graduate of the Clarion Writers Workshop in Lansing, Michigan, and holds a PhD in English from the University of Illinois, Chicago. She is an associate professor of creative writing and literature at the University at Buffalo (SUNY) and lives between Buffalo and Illinois with her family.

Nnedi Okorafor’s novels include Who Fears Death(winner of the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel and Le Prix Imaginales for Best Translated Novel), Akata Witch (an Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the CBS Parallax Award). Her latest releases include her short story collection Kabu Kabu (A Publisher’s Weekly Best Book for Fall 2013) and science fiction novel Lagoon (finalist for Best Novel in the British Science Fiction Association award for Best Novel and a Red Tentacle Award for Best Novel).