The KU Common Book program is coordinated by the KU Libraries, the Hall Center for the Humanities, and the Division of Academic Success. Author N. K. Jemisin will visit campus in April to give the Common Book Lecture. The Common Book for the 2023-24 school year is Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. Butler, who died in 2006, was influential to the career of Jemisin, a fellow science fiction writer, and Jemisin also wrote the forward to the most recent edition of Parable of the Sower.

N.K. Jemisin is the first author in history to win three consecutive Best Novel Hugo Awards, for her Broken Earth trilogy. Her work has won Nebula and Locus Awards, and she was a 2020 recipient of the MacArthur 'Genius' Fellowship. Her Great Cities duology was a New York Times bestseller. Her speculative works range from fantasy to science fiction to the undefinable; her themes include resistance to oppression, the inseverability of the liminal, and the coolness of “stuff blowing up.” She’s been an instructor for Clarion and Clarion West writing workshops. Among other critical work, she was formerly the science fiction and fantasy book reviewer at the New York Times and she has been an advocate for the long tradition of science fiction and fantasy as political resistance.

Jemisin lives in Brooklyn. In her spare time she’s a gamer and gardener, responsible for saving the world from her cats, the dangerously intelligent King Ozzymandias and his destructive sidekick, the Marvelous Master Magpie.

An Evening with N.K. Jemisin