Samuel r delany autobiography of malcolm

"Samuel Ray Delany, also known as "Chip," is an award-winning American science fiction author. He was born to a prominent black family on April 1, 1942, and raised in Harlem. His mother, Margaret Carey Boyd Delany, was a library clerk in the New York Public Library system. His father, Samuel Ray Delany, Senior, ran a successful Harlem undertaking establishment, Levy & Delany Funeral Home, on 7th Avenue, between 1938 and his death in 1960.

Delany was a published science fiction author by the age of 20. He published nine well-regarded science fiction novels between 1962 and 1968, as well as several prize-winning short stories (collected in Driftglass [1971] and more recently in Aye, and Gomorrah, and other stories [2002]). His eleventh and most popular novel, Dhalgren, was published in 1975. His main literary project through the late 1970s and 1980s was the Return to Nevèrÿon series, the overall title of the four volumes and also the title of the fourth and final book." - Goodreads

With ‘Dhalgren,’ Delany’s authorial identity and readership definitively slipped the confines of the sci-fi ghetto—this, ironically, via a book set in an American ghetto that still reads as stranger and more perilous than any terraformed planet in the genre’s canon. The book’s world is a nightmare from which its elusive antihero cannot awaken.

When the artist Arthur Jafa and this writer began to nerd out over various fanboy obsessions at Howard University in the late ’70s, the works of Delany quickly arose as shared talismans of estranged and alienated Blackness, not least because we were the only other Black people we knew for years who’d completed ‘Dhalgren’ (many are called, few are chosen). We’d also both devoured the rapturous and rhapsodic opening chapter of Delany’s ‘Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,’ 30 pages of which first appeared in a literary journal in 1980. (The full novel appeared four years later.) Jafa’s longstanding ardor for ‘Stars’ moved him a couple years ago to initiate a collaboration with Delany and Fred Moten to transform the novel into an opera—one which they hope to premier next year.

I asked Jafa recently about why he chose ‘Stars,’ out of all of the novels and stories, for operatic treatment, then I asked him to speak more

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