Interview of fiction writer Iheoma Nwachukwu

Iheoma Nwachukwu, fiction writer and former professional chess player who teaches in the Creative Writing department at Florida State University, is interviewed by doctoral student Kimberly Williams at Zora's place in Eatonville, Florida. Nwachukwu talks about how he fuses his Igbo Nigerian culture into speculative fiction that expands the notion of the precolonial vampire and witch. Nwachukwu posits that Afrofuturism provides Black youth a voice and window that Blackness and utopia can coexist like in the film The Black Panther. He also discusses the literary, cultural critique of Afrofuturism in the African literature cannon and the relevance of Afrofuturism in Nigerian life. He identifies the tenets of Afrofuturism through Hurston's ethnography in Haiti and her work on Black consciousness.