Black Speculative, African Horror, and Cross-Genre Media Monographs

Series editor: Eugen Bacon

We are fascinated with monographs interrogating classic and contemporary black speculative literature, afro-centered futurisms, African, and other horror and genre-benders in literature, cinema, television, music or stage. 

In a form of subversive activism, speculative fiction empowers a different kind of writing with its unique worldbuilding that has, over decades, emboldened writers like Octavia Butler and Toni Morrison to write a different kind of story that’s also about writing oneself in. 

Morrison was compelled to write something she could relate to, and Butler finally decided to “write herself in” because stories of her time did not feature an “other” like her. Black speculative fiction continues to rise as a powerful conversation in genre fiction, and increasingly tackles precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial themes pertaining to identity and culture, as well as feminist and queer themes pertaining to engaging with difference. 

Channel Academic’s Black Speculative, African Horror, and Cross-Genre Media Monographs series offers a crucial space for people of color to showcase revolutionary speculative fiction in stories of soul and claim: snatching their own power with fundamental philosophical questions and confronting themes that not only contemplate but demand different futures. 

Talk to us about these critical stories, that may be:  

  • Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1971) film with its superstition, colonization, and magical realism, directed by Hans Jürgen Pohland
  • Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1998) with its themes of slavery, memory, and motherhood, directed by Jonathan Demme
  • Misha Green’s Lovecraft Country (2020) with its cosmic dread and forbidden knowledge
  • Ryan Coogler’s Sinners (2025) with its racial violence, the power of music, and transcendence
  • Nuzo Onoh’s Where the Dead Brides Gather (2024), a sinister and gripping tale of spectral in habitation by the ‘Queen of African Horror’
  • Wole Talabi’s (editor) Mothersound: The Sauútiverse Anthology with its Afrocentric futurisms
  • And more!

Tell us what’s unique about your topic, and why you’re the best person to write it. 

We accept book proposals for monographs:

  • up to 30,000 words
  • longer works on topics in Black speculative, African horror, and genre benders—single-authored or edited essay anthologies

Citation Style

We use Chicago-style citations. 

Current Titles

  • The Brother from Another Planet: The Voiceless Tongue, Afrofuturist Silence, and Somatic Liberation by Audrey T. Williams (forthcoming)

Submit

To submit your proposal, see Publish with Us.

Series Editor

Eugen Bacon, MA, MSc, PhD, is an African Australian author of several novels and collections. She’s a Solstice, British Fantasy and Foreword Indies Award winner, a twice World Fantasy and Shirley Jackson Award finalist, and a finalist in the Philip K. Dick, Ignyte, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award, and the Nommo Awards for speculative fiction by Africans. 

Eugen is an Otherwise Fellow, and was also announced in the honor list for ‘doing exciting work in gender and speculative fiction’. Danged Black Thing made the Otherwise Award Honor List as a ‘sharp collection of Afro-Surrealist work’. 

She’s an Adjunct Fellow at the University of Tasmania, and a 2024 Hedberg Writer-in-Residence. Visit her at eugenbacon.com.