Nalo Hopkinson is an author and editor of speculative fiction. Her writing is influenced by the fairy and folk tales she read at a young age in Kingston, which included Afro-Caribbean stories like Anansi, as well as Western works like Gulliver's Travels, the Iliad, and the Odyssey. Currently, she is a professor in Creative Writing at University of California Riverside.Her first book, the novel "Brown Girl in the Ring," was published in 1998.Hopkinson received her M.A. in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University.