Janelle Monáe, Yohanca Delgado, and George M. Johnson

Musician, actor, and fashion icon Janelle Monáe has long been creating sci-fi worlds through her albums and performances. With her new short story collection The Memory Librarian, Monáe, along with a team of collaborators, expands on the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, Dirty Computer.  Dirty Computer introduced us to a world where people’s memories—a key to self-expression and self-understanding—could be controlled or erased by an increasingly powerful few. And whether human, A.I., or something in-between, citizen’s lives and sentience were dictated by those of the New Dawn, who’d convinced themselves they had the right to decide fate—that was, until Jane 57821 remembered and broke free. On April 24, 2022, Monáe came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to appear in conversation with one of the Memory Librarian collaborators, short story writer Yohanca Delgado, and George M. Johnson, whose memoir All Boys Aren’t Blue, has been banned in a recent wave of censorship of books dealing with themes like race and gender identity.