Nalo Hopkinson was born in Jamaica in 1960. She lives in Toronto. In 1997, her novel Brown Girl in the Ring won the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest and was published by Warner Books in 1998. She has taken second place in the Short Prose Competition of the Writers’ Union of Canada, and is the recipient of the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and the Locus Award for a first novel.

Her second novel, Midnight Robber, appeared in March 2000 from Warner Books. She also edited Whispers From the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction. Skin Folk, a collection of her short stories, was published by Warner Books in December 2001.

Her short fiction has appeared in Toronto journals Fireweed and Exile and in a number of anthologies, including Women of Other Worlds: Excursions Through Science Fiction and Feminism (University of Western Australia Press, 1999); Tesseracts 6, the Annual Anthology of New Canadian Speculative Fiction (Tesseract Books, 1997), and Dark Matter: a Century of Speculative Fiction From the African Diaspora (Warner Books, 2000).

In November 2000 she taught a course through the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, titled “Rocket Grrls, Chicks in Chainmail and Loud-Mouthed Crones: Women Writing Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy.” She has also taught a course in science fiction literature through the Continuing Education Department of the University of Toronto.