Nalo Hopkinson, a Jamaican-born Canadian author, has become in less than a decade a critically acclaimed novelist of speculative/science fiction and an original voice in the critical and political debates about speculative fiction, feminism, and afro-futurism. For her three novels, Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), Midnight Robber (2000), The Salt Roads (2003), for her collection of short fiction, Skin Folk (2001), and for her three edited anthologies, she has received wide critical recognition, including winning the Locus First Novel Award, the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, the Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic, and the World Fantasy Award, among others. Her most recent novel, The New Moon's Arms (2007), is published by Warner/Hachett. Hopkinson attended the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Workshop as a student in 1995; now she is one of its teachers.

I first met Nalo Hopkinson in 1999 when she agreed to read from her new novel, Midnight Robber, at a small academic sf conference in her home city, Toronto. But that was after I had seen her in a 30-second video clip on Canada's Space Channel introducing her first novel: she was the hippest and sexiest writer I'd ever seen in my ten years of science fiction convention-going. I bought Brown Girl in the Ring and found an intelligent, inventive style and compelling characters.