photos by svheartphotography

It took my breath away when I entered the hall and saw 750 high school students from across the state of Wisconsin, row after row of them, all looking up at a screen where an AI-generated spider scrambled through a forested landscape. Three students were at the podium explaining how they had used a range of advanced AI tools to render an animation of Nnedi Okorafor’s Death and the Author‘s post-apocalyptic world. The organizers had prepared me for this, but I don’t think anything could have readied me for the grandness of it— seeing all these young readers gathered in one place around one of the most significant works of African fiction in recent years.

This took place on April 7th, 2026, at Union South Hall on the University of Wisconsin–Madison campus, for the annual Great World Texts Student Conference. This year’s selected book was Okorafor’s Death of the Author, and the students who packed that room had spent the better part of an academic year reading the novel. When Okorafor saw all these students cheering, on her arrival, she was visibly moved. She hadn’t expected the attendance would be at such a scale. That reaction, from a writer who has published forty books and stood in front of crowds all over the world, said a lot.

The Great World Texts (GWT) program is a common read initiative run by UW–Madison’s Center for the Humanities. Now in its twentieth year, the program has brought Wisconsin high schoolers into conversation with some of the most significant writers in the world, such as Orhan Pamuk, Margaret Atwood, Tommy Orange, and many others. They select one book per year for high school teachers statewide to teach. Teachers receive a curriculum guide, a classroom set of texts, a stipend to offset the costs of buses and substitute teachers, and an invitation to bring their students to Madison for a full-day conference in April. This year that guide was written by Theophilus Okunlola, who was at the time a doctoral candidate in the English department finishing his dissertation at the intersection of disability studies and African literature, a pairing that made him, as it turned out, an almost uncannily perfect fit for Okorafor’s novel. The guide grounded teachers in Africanfuturism as the creative and intellectual framework, connected the novel to questions about AI and social media, and examined the theme of disability that runs through the novel.

The map of participating schools, scattered across the state from the Milwaukee metro to the northern reaches of the state, tells its own story. These places don’t immediately come to mind when people talk about African literature or African science fiction in the US. But thanks to this program, students got to read a science fiction novel written by a Nigerian American woman who also happens to be one of the most decorated science fiction writers alive. Death of the Author is a structurally ambitious metafiction. Its protagonist, Zelu, is a disabled Nigerian American novelist who, after losing her university job and receiving yet another rejection letter on the same catastrophic afternoon, writes something entirely for herself, a sprawling far-future epic she calls Rusted Robots, set in the overgrown ruins of Lagos, populated by androids and AI locked in post-human conflict. Within Okorafor’s novel, then, we have another novel; we have science fiction nested inside literary fiction nested inside what reads like an autobiography. On every level, the book is probing the power and cost of pushing the boundaries of storytelling. Kimberly Rooney, the Africana and Francophone librarian curated a website of research resources around the book and a beautiful exhibition displayed at the university’s main library lobby featuring textile and books.

At the heart of the conference are two poster sessions where students share artifacts they created in response to the novel. As I walked through the displays, every cliché about the power of literature to connect worlds stopped being a cliché. It turns out that literature can still do its ancient work of transporting people across the borders of the familiar and bringing them into another way of organizing experience. A student created a miniature Ijele, one of the most celebrated Igbo masked spirits. Two students bought Nigerian food mentioned in the novel from a restaurant and filmed themselves trying each dish, and recorded their reactions. There was a very elaborate board game built around the warring robots in the novel. There was a full makeup look that merged Zelu’s face with Ankara the robot’s. There were short films, paintings, sculptures, wax print fabric made from scratch. Hundreds of projects. In all my decades as a literature professor, I have never seen anything like it. The range of the projects were astonishing.

These are students from small towns and mid-sized cities in the American Midwest, worlds away — geographically, culturally — from Lagos, from Igbo cosmology, from the specific textures of Nigerian American experience that suffuse Okorafor’s novel. And here they were, making things—visual things, written things, performed things— in such beautifully, fruitful conversation with Okorafor’s work and the book’s many provocations on the body, family, what technology takes from us and what it might give back, and about who can author their own story.

People often say that African literature is taught reductively in American schools, and there is a lot of truth to that. I want to share some thoughts on how the engagement with Okorafor’s text that I witnessed at the conference might offer one way to address this — because the challenge of teaching culturally distant texts in American schools is not, in fact, an African literature problem alone.

Because African literature is not well integrated into the curriculum, a single text can end up carrying an impossible amount of pedagogical weight. A novel like Things Fall Apart is made to stand in for an entire literary tradition, making it difficult to present African literature as dynamic in terms of form and aesthetics. Add to this the misconceptions about African worlds that pervade Western media, and the result is a situation where teaching African books in American classrooms is challenging, something I have personally struggled with all through my 20 years of teaching African literature at the university level.

What I saw in Madison could be an answer to this broader problem of teaching culturally distant texts. If students had simply been asked to interpret Death of the Author, they would have been primed to grab the most accessible handle on the text: what does this tell me about Africa, about disability, about AI, which would invariably lead to the kinds of issues noted above. The GWT approach is different because of the creative aspect. Asking the students to create something in conversation with the novel, to essentially translate the novel into another form, changes how they engage with it. They cannot rely on surface-level understanding because the task demands decisions. They have to decide what matters in the text, what can be carried over, what must be reimagined. That process creates a kind of friction that forces attentiveness. It pulls them closer to the structure of the novel, to its imagery, and the logics and tensions of its many worlds. This reduces the likelihood of flattening the novel into a set of themes or cultural takeaways.

The GWT approach also works because it redistributes the weight of the text. Instead of asking one novel to stand in for African literature or African science fiction as a whole in an abstract way, it allows the novel to generate a multiplicity of responses. The diversity of student projects expands the text outward. What might otherwise feel like a narrow or overburdened representation is now a force field of hundreds of artworks that offers different interpretations. The students collectively produce the kind of richness that the curriculum cannot supply by itself.

There is also something important about the scale and the public format of the conference. The projects were made to be seen and discussed. They were also often made collectively. The students who created Eco Exo System, a brilliant pipe-cleaner installation that stages an encounter between plants from Chicago and Nigeria, told me that the work was so intricate and time-consuming that they had to recruit family members to help. That detail says something about the level of investment the project demanded but, more importantly, that Death of the Author touched their lives beyond the classroom.

As a teacher, my big takeaway from witnessing the Great World Texts conference is that teaching culturally distant texts well is not solely a matter of stuffing students with more explanations. We can add all the background or correct all the misconceptions, but if we don’t provide the right conditions for creative engagement, we won’t go far. Finding ways to take a literary text outside the classroom is part of the work.

One of Okorafor’s favorite writers is Ben Okri, who has argued in many places that stories are most powerful when they generate more stories. What I witnessed in that building was exactly that. These young people took Okorafor’s novel and let it make possible their own imaginations of other worlds and how these visions illuminate their understanding of their realities. And big shoutout to their teachers, who guided them from the first page of a 400-plus-page book all the way to the creation of the beautiful artifacts showcased at the conference.

Something else worth noting: these kinds of event do not happen in a vacuum. UW–Madison has maintained a commitment to African literature and African cultural studies for decades, a fact that surprises many people, given where Madison is on the US map. The Department of African Cultural Studies here is the only one of its kind in the United States. The university has been home to South African greats like A.C. Jordan and D.P. Kunene, to scholars like Tejumola Olaniyan, Aliko Songolo, Harold Scheub, Henry John Drewal, Jan Vansina and many others. In recent years, the African Studies program has funded initiatives to stock public libraries across Wisconsin with African books. The selection of Okorafor’s work as a Great World Text and the massive investment made to stage this conference, is a continuation of a much longer institutional commitment — and an expression of the Wisconsin Idea, the principle that the boundaries of the university should be the boundaries of the state — to the belief that African scholarship belongs in the public life of the state.

Later that event, the evening event at the Madison’s Public Library, sponsored by the Wisconsin Book Festival, drew close to 200 people. I moderated the conversation, which ranged across Okorafor’s body of work, exploring the extraordinary worlds in her science fiction writing. The long line for book signing was clear indication that Madisonians had been waiting for this visit.

All through the ride back to Nnedi’s hotel, we were having a lovely conversation about the African literary scene, but my mind kept drifting back to the students in the Discovery building. Death of the Author is an experimental novel, rooted in Igbo cosmology, set partly in Lagos, not an easy read for anyone, let alone a high schooler, but it had reached into communities that, in another cultural moment, might never have encountered it. I felt happy for Wisconsinites. They had experienced, many of them perhaps for the first time, the uncommon brilliance of African storytelling and its way of making the world newly possible.