Opening Hours
Daily: 10 A.M.–5 P.M.
Closed on Tuesdays
1151 Oxford Road
San Marino, CA 91108
Founders’ Day 2025 | Sowing Community: Living with Octavia E. Butler’s “Parables”
Event
Sold Out
Past eventWed., March 26, 2025, 6:30–8:30 p.m.
Free with reservation
Education and Visitor Center, Rothenberg Hall
Join a special guest panel of community leaders and expert scholars for a conversation on Octavia E. Butler’s novels “Parable of the Sower” and “Parable of the Talents,” which focus on themes of resilience, community, and social change.
Read “Octavia E. Butler’s Seeds of Change”
Watch a video of the Founders’ Day event in its entirety
Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 novel Parable of the Sower begins in a dystopian Southern California in 2024, following teenager Lauren Olamina and an expanding circle of companions as they confront violence, earthquakes, fires, and scarce resources. The group makes their way to Northern California to establish a new community based on the principles of Earthseed, a religion that Lauren develops in response to the social, political, and climatological distress in the world around her.
The Huntington, which holds Butler’s archive, will host a conversation about Parable of the Sower and its 1998 sequel, Parable of the Talents, with moderator Monique Thomas and panelists Nikki High, Tamisha A. Tyler, and John Williams. They will explore Butler’s call to community building, her influence on writers and activists, and how her fiction does—and doesn’t—speak to the present moment.
Program
6 p.m. | Doors Open
6:30–7:30 p.m. | Public Program, Rothenberg Hall
7:30–8:30 p.m. | Post-Program Conversation, Haaga Hall
We invite attendees to meet one another and engage in a deeper discussion following the program.
