Octavia Butler is the author of eleven novels, including Kindred, Dawn, and Parable of the Sower, and one collection of short fiction, Bloodchild, which Seven Stories will reissue in October with two new, never-before-published stories. Butler is the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant, the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, a lifetime achievement award in writing from PEN, and numerous other literary awards.

An independent writer, teacher, poet, lecturer, and consultant, Akasha Gloria Hull has been a professor of women's studies and literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, the University of Delaware, and the University of the West Indies-Mona in Kingston, Jamaica. She holds B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees and also a honorary Doctor of Letters, awarded by Purdue University in 1992 "for pioneering work in the field of black feminist studies that has empowered others to hear and appreciate diverse voices." She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright, Rockefeller, Mellon and Ford Foundations, the American Association of University Women, and the National Humanities Center.

Her book, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (co-edited), garnered the National Institute's Women of Color Award. She is also the author of Give Us Each Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson; Color, Sex, and Poetry: Three Women Writers of the Harlem Renaissance; and Healing Heart: Poems. Her latest book, Soul Talk: The New Spirituality of African-American Women (Inner Traditions, 2001) was praised in Publishers Weekly as "powerful, practical and nourishing gumbo . . . of the heart and spirit." She is currently completing the first novel of a projected trilogy set in the contemporary United States, the slavery South, and the 23rd century future.