ANAHEIM, Calif. — Actress Mallori Johnson first encountered the work of writer Octavia Butler when she read “Fledgling,” a novel about a young Black vampire. It was the summer before she left home for the Julliard School in New York City.
“I just fell in love with the fact that she was able to create these kinds of fantastical, magical worlds that centered on Black people,” says Johnson, who grew up in San Diego. “That was something that I had never heard or experienced before, so that was really exciting.”
A year or two later, Johnson’s mom gave her a copy of “Kindred,” another novel by the late Pasadena-based writer, and that book – in which a young Black woman suddenly and unpredictably begins to time-travel between present-day Los Angeles and a slave plantation in the antebellum South – had an even bigger impact.
