Nalo Hopkinson was born 20 December 1960 in
Kingston, Jamaica, to Freda and
Abdur Rahman Slade Hopkinson. She grew up in
Guyana,
Trinidad, and Canada. She was raised in a literary environment; her mother was a library technician and her father a
Guyanese poet, playwright and actor who also taught
English and
Latin. By virtue of this upbringing, Hopkinson had access to writers such as
Derek Walcott during her formative years, and could read
Kurt Vonnegut's works by the age of six. she was also known to have read the works of
Shakespeare around the time she was reading
Homer. Though she lived briefly in
Connecticut in the U.S. during her father's tenure at
Yale University, Hopkinson has said that the culture shock from her move to
Toronto from Guyana at the age of 16 was something "to which [she's] still not fully reconciled". She lived in Toronto from 1977 to 2011, before moving to
Riverside,
California, where she works as Professor of Creative Writing at
University of California, Riverside. Hopkinson has a
Master of Arts degree in Writing
Popular Fiction from
Seton Hill University, where she studied with her mentor and instructor,
science fiction writer
James Morrow. She has learning disabilities. ==Career==