Severance Radio is an on-air book club dissecting Ling Ma’s satirical, dystopian novel Severance. The novel is a moving family story that explores loneliness, corporate monotony, and survival in the midst of a global health crisis.

In this episode, Jenna Hanchey and Erica Vital-Lazare – two scholars who study language – talk about the new voices needed to imagine new worlds.

Jenna Hanchey is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno. Her research focuses on the neocolonialism of aid and volunteer work in Africa, and she is currently working on a project examining how Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist sci-fi imagines development in anti-colonial ways.

Erica Vital-Lazare is a writer and a professor of creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada, where she teaches Marginalized Voices in Dystopian literature, and she is the editor of a forthcoming series revisiting classic Black works in literature titled Of the Diaspora with McSweeney’s Press.