Looking for readers who love Octavia Butler and memoirs!

July 04, 2025

Hi everyone! Are you ready to see our next tour sign-ups?

We are so excited to be able to bring you a Creative Book Tour for Positive Obsession, written by Susana M. Morris! Out August 19th from Amistad

The tour will run from August 19th to August 25th 2025 and we'd love your help to promote this book ☺️ This tour is open internationally to those who can feature the book in an Instagram feed post or share a creative reel, a TikTok, or a blog post.

Positive Obsession is a magnificent cultural biography that charts the life of one of our greatest writers, situating her alongside the key historical and social moments that shaped her work.

Digital copies will be available for everyone who’s selected, while physical copies will be available for those who are US/CAN-based.

If selected, you’ll receive a confirmation email from us within a week. Scroll down to learn more about the book and sign up for this tour!

About the book:

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. Her fiction charts the rise and fall of the American project—the nation’s transformation from a provincial backwater to a capitalist juggernaut—made possible by chattel slavery—to a bloated imperialist superpower on the verge of implosion. 

In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life: the Civil Rights Movement, Black Power, women’s liberation, queer rights, Reaganomics. Morris reveals how these influences profoundly impacted Butler’s personal and intellectual trajectory and shaped the ideas central to her writing. Her cautionary tales warn us about succumbing to fascism, gender-based violence, and climate chaos while offering alternate paradigms to religion, family, and understanding our relationships to ourselves. Butler envisioned futures with Black women at the center, raising our awareness of how those who are often dismissed have the knowledge to shift the landscape of our world. But her characters are no magical martyrs, they are tough, flawed, intelligent, and complicated, a reflection of Butler’s stories. 

Morris explains what drove Butler: She wrote because she felt she must. “Who was I anyway? Why should anyone pay attention to what I had to say? Did I have anything to say? I was writing science fiction and fantasy, for God’s sake. At that time nearly all professional science-fiction writers were white men. As much as I loved science fiction and fantasy, what was I doing? Well, whatever it was, I couldn’t stop. Positive obsession is about not being able to stop just because you’re afraid and full of doubts. Positive obsession is dangerous. It’s about not being able to stop at all.” 

Thank you for signing up for our tours! However, please keep in mind that signing up does not guarantee you a spot on the tour since copies are very limited. We always consider both small and big accounts that love to read and engage with the book community.

All the best,

Colored Pages Team

Disclaimer: Colored Pages Tours only collects information (email, name, and social media links) to contact book influencers for tours they signed up for or to send book tour invites if they wish to sign up. When we do share the information it’s limited to what’s necessary for the authors or publishers to send the needed materials for the book tours.