A magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work. 

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. 

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. 

Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.”

BIO

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. 

REVIEWS

“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. 

[H]  Amistad Press  /  August 19, 2025

1.1" H x 9.1" L x 6.1" W (0.9 lbs) 272 pages