Isis Asare, SFWA’s former executive director who exited the organization earlier this summer after barely a year in the role, just resurfaced at the West Oakland Public Library. On July 18, she and author Angela Dalton headlined “A Is For Afrofuturism,” a free event hosted by Sistah Scifi, explicitly billed on the flyer as “made possible through a micrograt from the Oakland Literacy Coalition.” The same week, on the other side of the country, it was announced N.K. Jemisin will lead a worldbuilding workshop at the Bronx Library Center, part of the New York Public Library’s Big Summer Book Club built around her novel The City We Became, with a follow-up public conversation scheduled at the Delacorte Theater on August 17.
Two major public library systems, three thousand miles apart, running Afrofuturism-adjacent programming built around prominent diversity-in-SFF figures in the same stretch of summer. It poses a question: is this coincidence, or is there a funding and booking pipeline connecting events like these?
The honest answer, based on how library programming actually gets funded, is that there’s real money behind these events, but it’s not the kind of money that raises eyebrows on its own. Public libraries don’t typically pay bestseller-level speaking fees. Author honoraria for standard library appearances run in a fairly modest range, often $200 to $500 for a single event, occasionally higher for a genuinely bestselling name, funded through library programming budgets, state Arts & Cultural Heritage grants, ALA microgrants, or local literacy coalitions exactly like the one named on the Oakland flyer. Minnesota’s state arts fund, for example, has paid out grants as small as $500 for single keynote author appearances and as large as $13,000+ for multi-branch literary programming series. That’s the actual scale of this system: modest, publicly or quasi-publicly funded honoraria distributed through grant programs designed to bring authors into community spaces, not lucrative paydays.
None of that means the money is trivial or that it’s not worth tracking. It is real government-adjacent funding, channeled through literacy coalitions, library systems, and state arts councils, and it does function as a form of institutional support for specific authors and specific themes that has nothing to do with book sales. An author doesn’t need to move units to get booked for one of these events. They need name recognition with library programming staff and the right thematic fit for a grant category, which is exactly the kind of soft institutional support that can keep a writer’s public profile alive independent of how their books are actually performing in the market. Whether that’s happening by design or simply because Afrofuturism-themed programming is genuinely popular with library audiences and grant committees right now isn’t something I can confirm from the outside without seeing the actual grant applications and event booking process for these two specific events.
What is confirmed: Asare’s SFWA tenure ended after roughly a year with no public explanation beyond warm year-end language, and she’s now doing paid-adjacent public programming through a literacy grant on one coast, while Jemisin, one of the genre’s most visible three-time Hugo winners, is doing NYPL’s flagship summer author programming on the other, in the same general window. If you want a clearer answer on whether there’s a coordinated circuit here versus simple coincidence, the next step would be pulling the actual Oakland Literacy Coalition grant filing and the NYPL Big Summer Book Club’s selection process to see who’s actually making these picks and what criteria they’re using. That’s a records request, not something searchable from outside.
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