Impolitic!

by Andrea Hairston, Debbie Notkin

Impolitic! offers a selection of work from Andrea Hairston and Debbie Notkin, WisCon 36's Guests of Honor. In a long essay, Notkin samples her incisive blog posts on body politics, examining the narratives told about our bodies and how we are told to live in and think about them, inciting her readers to the most profound rebellion. Tiptree Award-winning Hairston offers us a short fiction, ''Griots of the Galaxy,'' that enacts that profound rebellion in all its visceral, thrilling drama. Hairston's essay ''Prophetic Artists,'' grounded in the early twenty-first century, looks to Octavia Butler and others to illuminate the immanent possibilities of the here and now, reminding us of why sf/f is so necessary to us in 2012. And finally, Notkin and Hairston interview one another. Impolitic! is, throughout, an exemplar of what Hairston in that interview calls the theatre of the mind, where lived experience is transformed into meaning and performed.

146 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 2012

About the author

Andrea Hairston is an African-American science fiction and fantasy playwright and novelist who is best known for her novels Mindscape and Redwood and Wildfire. Mindscape, Hairston's first novel, won the Carl Brandon Parallax Award and short-listed for the Philip K. Dick Award and the James Tiptree, Jr. Award.

She is the Artistic Director of Chrysalis Theatre and has created original productions with music, dance, and masks for more than a decade. Hairston is also the Louise Wolff Kahn 1931 Professor of Theatre and Afro-American Studies at Smith College. She teaches playwriting, African, African American, and Caribbean theatre literature. Her plays have been produced at Yale Rep, Rites and Reason, the Kennedy Center, StageWest, and on public radio and television. In addition, Hairston has translated plays by Michael Ende and Kaca Celan from German to English.

(source: Wikipedia)