World Fantasy Award-winning author Nalo Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and also spent her childhood in Trinidad and Guyana before her family moved to Toronto when she was sixteen. Her groundbreaking science fiction and fantasy features diverse characters and the mixing of folklore into her works. Hopkinson won the Warner Aspect First Novel contest for Brown Girl in the Ring, as well as the John W. Campbell and Locus Awards. Her novel Midnight Robber was a New York Times Notable Book and she has also received the Spectrum, Sunburst, Campbell, and Prix Aurora awards. Though she has published multiple works, Hopkinson has faced many obstacles, including suffering from anemia and fibromyalgia. She spent years too sick to read or write, and was sometimes homeless. Her view on these dark periods can be both realistic and humorous: "But every so often I'll go through an old notebook or find a file I don't recognize and open it up, and there's a page or two of writing that I did during that time that I don not remember. At some level I was still writing. The cool part about it is, the writing is pretty good!" (Locus, September 2013) Hopkinson currently teaches in the Creative Writing department at the University of California, Riverside.