Octavia Butler Life And Accomplishments

Octavia Estelle Butler was born on June 22, 1947, in Pasadena, California. She lost her father when she was seven years old, and was raised by her grandmother and her mother, who supported the family by working as a maid.
As a child, Butler was known for her shyness and her impressive height- she grew to be six feet tall. She was dyslexic, which, along with her height and her shyness, made school a nightmare for her. However, she didn't let these challenges deter her from developing a love of books, and spent much of her free time reading at the Pasadena Public Library. Besides having a passion for reading, Butler also became very fond of writing, filling pages and pages in her notebook.
Butler first started writing stories around this time,

Her college career was spent taking classes during the evening and working during the day. It was in college that , for the first time, Butler earned money for something she'd written- she won $15 for a short story she'd written for a contest. Butler received an associate degree in History in 1968.
Once out of college, Butler took odd jobs to make ends meet, while also finding the time to write early in the mornings. Later she began to take writing courses at UCLA, where she was referred to a six-week workshop in Clarion, Pennsylvania, called the Clarion Science Fiction Writers Workshop. Thanks to the networking she did there, she was able to contribute her work to two anthologies.
In 1976, Butler published her first novel, Patternmaster, which became the Seed to Harvest or Patternist series. The Patternist series is science fiction, fitting into the genre by means of the science (biological engineering). The series touches on the subjects of race, gender, the ethics of bio-engineering, and the nature of humanity, among other themes common to science fiction. By the time Butler had published Survivor in 1978, she was finally able to live off of her book sales rather than odd temp

This was the beginning of her (in my opinion, well deserved) rise to critical acclaim. In 1985, she won another Hugo for her story “Bloodchild”, as well as the Locus Award, and the Science Fiction Chronicle Reader Award for Best Novelette.
Around this time, Butler began to do research for what would eventually become the Xenogenesis trilogy. She published the novels in this series beginning with Dawn in 1987 and ending in 1989.

In the 1990's, Butler began work on the Parable of the Sower series, publishing the first novel in 1993 and it's sequel in 1998 (Parable of the Talents won the Science Fiction Writers of America’s Nebula Award for Best Science Novel). In 1995, she became the first science-fiction writer to be awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
The last book Butler published wouldn't come for another seven years, as Butler became depressed and suffered from writer's block after the death of her mother in 1999. But, in 2005, Fledgling was published, and that same year Butler was inducted into Chicago State University’s International Black Writers Hall of Fame
During her final years, Butler continued to struggle with writer’s block and depression, and though she continued to write, her work during this time have, to my knowledge, remained