theatrical work. In 2009, Okorafor donated her archive to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) Collection of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections at the Northern Illinois University Library. Okorafor was the Young Adult Author special Guest of Honor at Detcon1, the 2014 North American Science Fiction Convention; Detcon1 was putting special emphasis on YA science fiction. She spoke at the TEDGlobal conference in Arusha, Tanzania, in August 2017. In October 2017, Okorafor announced via Twitter she would be writing three issues for Marvel's Black Panther comic, picking up where author Ta-Nehisi Coates left off. The first issue of Black Panther: Long Live the King was released in December 2017. A month earlier, a short comic of hers titled "Blessing in Disguise" was included in Marvel's Venomverse War Stories No. 1, inspired by the 2014 Boko Haram kidnapping of more than 200 Nigerian girls. In March 2017, it was announced that she would return to writing derived from the Black Panther, in Wakanda Forever, where the Dora Milaje team-up with Spider-Man, the X-Men and the Avengers. In July 2018, it announced that Okorafor would write a solo title focused on Black Panther's sister, Shuri. Broken Places & Outer Spaces, Okorafor's first non-fiction title, was published by Simon & Schuster in 2019. Okorafor contributed the essay "Zula of the fourth-grade playground" to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby. In 2018, her comic book limited series LaGuardia was published by Berger Books. In 2020, the collected trade won an Eisner Award and a Hugo Award. Influences and themes Okorafor's novels and stories reflect both her West African heritage and her American life. Rather than identifying as Nigerian-American, she refers to herself as "Naijamerican" and explains the importance of her dual heritage during a 2016 NPR interview: That's very much a part of my identity, and it's also very much a reason why I think I ended up writing science fiction and fantasy because I live on these borders – and these borders that allow me to see from multiple perspectives and kind of take things in and then kind of process certain ideas and certain stories in a very unique way. And that has led me to write this strange fiction that I write, which really isn't that strange if you really look at it through a sort of skewed lens. Okorafor