Nina King Sannes is an English PhD student on the creative track, with a deep artistic and scholarly interest in the study of contemporary women’s fiction. She will be presenting her paper “Converging Dys/Utopias in Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower” at the Contemporary Women’s Writing Association Conference in Falmouth, UK from June 18-20, 2025. This paper uses Octavia Butler’s novel to dissect dystopian and utopian futures within fiction — dystopian fiction being in a position of social and political import due to its function as a literary warning shot, a realization of contemporary fears projected onto an imagined future. Through examination of Parable of the Sower and its theoretical and historical contexts, we may find the definitions of dys/utopia are set in sand – they shift with their own weight, unstable, inextricable from one another and from the eyes of the reader.