Nalo Hopkinson Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

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Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Black Stars Books

Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas

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Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson was born December 20, 1960 in Jamaica. She grew up in Trinidad, Jamaica, Guyana, before she moved with her family to Toronto, Canada in the year 1977.

Nalo wrote her first story at some point between the ages of nine and eleven. Her English teacher asked her class to write a mystery. So Nalo penned a story that was a mix of a vampire tale and a murder mystery that was about a Catholic priest and holy water and a cross and ting and ting.

After that, her creative spark lay dormant for awhile, from fifteen to 33 she didn’t write anything except a few articles and a groaner of a poem. It wasn’t until her dad was dying that her spark to write came back.

Before this prompting from her teacher, she hadn’t realized that she was interested in writing fantasy or fiction. The inspiration for this first story was subtle, and the product of her wildly diverse reading list.

Nalo grew up in a literary environment, as her mom was a library technician and her dad was a Guyanese playwright, poet, and actor who taught Latin and English. She started reading at the age of three, and was reading Kurt Vonnegut and Homer’s “Iliad” by the age of ten. Her favorite fiction was always been the different kinds of fantastical fiction; everything ranging from Ursula K. Le Guin’s fantasy and science fiction to Caribbean folklore.

Nalo started writing in the genre sometime around 1993, and sold some short stories. Then she attended the Clarion Science Fiction Writing Workshop, then held at Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan in the year 1995.

While writing, she often uses themes of Caribbean folklore, feminism, and Caribbean culture. She is historically conscious and uses her knowledge from growing up in Caribbean communities within her work. This includes the use of Creole and character backgrounds

Even though she lived in Connecticut briefly during her dad’s tenure at Yale University, Hopkinson has said the culture shock from her move to Toronto from Guyana at the age of sixteen was something that she still hasn’t fully reconciled.

From 1977 to 2011 she lived in Toronto before she moved to Riverside, California where she accepted a position as Professor of Creative Writing at University of California Riverside.

She has a Masters of Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University. Here, she studied with her instructor and mentor, James Morrow, a science fiction author.

Nalo sews, design fabrics, craft objects in whichever media strikes her fancy, and cooks food that, for the most part, turns out pretty well. She also loves bopping around in the surf, likes moderate sunshine, and dreams of one day living in a converted fire station, church, or library.

Nalo has worked in libraries, as government culture research officer, and held the post of grants officer at the Toronto Arts Council.

“Brown Girl in the Ring” won the 1999 Locus Award for Best Novel, the Warner Aspect First Novel Contest, and the 1998 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Nalo’s debut novel, called “Brown Girl in the Ring”, was released in the year 1998.

“The Salt Roads” is the third stand alone novel and was released in the year 2003. Three Caribbean slave women gather together one evening so they can bury a stillborn baby, their collected mournings braid into one powerful calling, and a deity is born.

This starts the epic journey of the spirit, who, in their desperate bid to find her own identity and nature, defies all limitations of place and time to inhabit the minds of living women throughout history.

From Jeanne Duval, who was the seductive black mistress of nineteenth century bohemian poet Charles Baudelaire. Then there is a Nubian prostitute on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 300 A.D. the spirit gathers the wisdom and power from the ages, just to come full circle on the island of St. Domingue. There, she gets reunited with the same women that gave her life, and still struggle for their own survival under brutal masters’ tyranny.

“The New Moon’s Arms” is the fourth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2007. What is in a name? Quite a lot, according to Chastity, a fifty-something year old Caribbean born that has adopted the more fitting moniker of Calamity. Calamity, true to her name, faces two big life transitions: she is in the beginning phases of menopause, a physical shift that has rekindled her special gift for locating lost things, and her dad has also died.

All of sudden, she gets hot flashes that appear to forge objects right out of thin air. Except this time, the lost item that has washed up on the shore isn’t her hairbrush or an old toy truck, but a four year old boy. While Calamity takes the kid into her care, she finds that all isn’t like it appears, as the boy’s family is rather unusual. Then Calamity has to reawaken to the mysteries that surround her own childhood and her mom’s early disappearance.

“The Chaos” is the fifth stand alone novel and was released in the year 2012. Scotch, age sixteen, struggles to even fit in, at home she is the perfect daughter, and at school she is provocatively sassy. And thanks to her mixed heritage, she does not feel she belongs with the whites, the Caribbeans, or even the blacks. Even more troubling, lately her skin has been covered in a sticky black substance that cannot be removed.

As she tries coping with this creepiness, she goes out with her brother, and he vanishes. A mysterious bubble of light swallows him right up, and Scotch has zero idea of how to find him. Quickly, the Chaos that has claimed Scotch’s brother affects the entire city, until it appears that everybody is turning into crazy creatures.

Scotch needs to get to the bottom of this supernatural situation quickly before the Chaos devours everything that she has ever known. She also knows that the black shadowy entity that started trailing every move she makes probably won’t help any.