Beacon Press, a “publisher of serious fiction and non-fiction owned by the Unitarian Universalist Organization,” has bought graphic novel adaptation rights to Octavia E. Butler‘s Kindred (Beacon published a new hardcover edition of the book in December 2008, following their trade paperback in 2004). Writers House‘s Merrilee Heifetz managed the deal on behalf of the Butler estate with Beacon Press Executive Director Helen Atwan.
Publishers Weekly goes into more depth on Beacon’s plans for a nonfiction comics line, and notes that Assistant Editor Alison Trzop has been promoted to oversee the new line. Trzop is currently soliciting proposals from artists for the book.
Kindred, originally published in 1979, is the story of “Dana, a modern black woman, [who] is celebrating her twenty-sixth birthday with her new husband when she is snatched abruptly from her home in California and transported to the antebellum South. Rufus, the white son of a plantation owner, is drowning, and Dana has been summoned to save him. Dana is drawn back repeatedly through time to the slave quarters, and each time the stay grows longer, more arduous, and more dangerous until it is uncertain whether or not Dana’s life will end, long before it has a chance to begin.”
Butler, who died in February 2006 at the age of 58, won two Hugo Awards (1984, 1985), two Nebulas (1984, 1999), the lifetime achievement award in writing from the PEN American Center (2000), and a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant (1995).