A Conversation with Author Nnedi Okorafor
Presented in partnership with Wisconsin Book Festival. Moderated by Ainehi Edoro, Vilas Early Career Professor and Constellations Mellon-Morgridge Professor at UW-Madison and founder and editor of Brittle Paper.
In this engaging Humanities Without Boundaries conversation, author Nnedi Okorafor will talk about her recent and upcoming works as well as her writing process. Following the conversation, books will be sold on-site by A Room of One’s Own and are available for signing.
Death of the Author is the 2025-26 selection for the Great World Texts in Wisconsin program, in which teachers and students from 30 high schools across the state of Wisconsin will read and engage with Okorafor’s novel. On April 7, 2026, these students convene on campus to connect with one another, share the projects they created in response to the novel, and meet the author.
Nnedi Okorafor’s visit to UW-Madison and Death of the Author in Wisconsin are supported by the UW-Madison Libraries; the Cleary-Kumm Foundation; the Evjue Foundation; the Wisconsin Book Festival; the Anonymous Fund of the University of Wisconsin-Madison; and the Brittingham Wisconsin Trust.
About the Text
Nnedi Okorafor’s latest novel, Death of the Author, is a masterpiece of metafiction that is surprisingly funny, deeply poignant, and endlessly discussable. Death of the Author is at once the tale of a woman on the margins risking everything to be heard and a testament to the power of storytelling to shape the world as we know it.
About the Author
Critically acclaimed sci-fi and fantasy writer Nnedi Okorafor is a professor of practice with the Interplanetary Initiative in The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Okorafor is the author of award-winning Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism, including dozens of novels, novellas and comics for children and adults. Her dual Nigerian and American heritage is the foundation and inspiration for much of her work. Some of her most well-known works include “Who Fears Death,” “LaGuardia,” “Remote Control” and “Wakanda Forever.” Her novella trilogy “Binti” is currently in development with Hulu as a TV series, in addition to film projects, books and a graphic novel.
Okorafor’s work has garnered myriad prestigious awards including a World Fantasy Award, Nebula Award, Hugo Award, Lodestar Award for Best Young Adult Book, Locus Award, an Eisner Award and a Wole Soyinka Prize for Literature in Africa.
Okorafor received her doctorate in English from the University of Illinois in 2007, a master’s degree in English from the University of Illinois in 2002, a master’s degree in journalism from Michigan State University in 1999 and a bachelor’s degree in rhetoric from the University of Illinois in 1996.
About the Moderator
Ainehi Edoro-Glines is a Nigerian literary scholar who studies African literature and digital culture. She is a Mellon Morgridge Assistant Professor of English and African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her research explores how stories, in novels and on social media, offer new ways of thinking about the art, politics, and philosophy of world-making.
Her book, Forest Imaginaries: How African Novels Think (forthcoming from Columbia University Press), traces how African novelists draw on the figure of the forest from indigenous narratives to create fictional worlds that challenge systems of power like colonialism, respond to disruption with creativity, and imagine futures beyond inherited structures.
She also studies digital culture through a literary lens, examining how social media platforms serve as spaces for experimenting with modes of perception and world-building. She teaches a large lecture course called “Social Media Writing,” which reimagines social media as a space for creativity, archive-making, and rhetorical experimentation.
Edoro-Glines is the founder and editor of Brittle Paper, a leading online platform for African literary culture. Her writing and commentary have appeared in The Guardian, BBC World News, Africa is a Country, and Times Literary Supplement. She has given lectures at Yale University, Northwestern University, the University of Stuttgart, and other institutions.