The Short Fiction of Nalo Hopkinson, better known as Skin Folk, is a 2001 collection of short stories by Jamaican-born Canadian writer Nalo Hopkinson. Hopkinson's stories draw mostly from the science fiction and fantasy genres and feature aspects of Jamaican/Trinidadian/West Indian folklore, which she refers to as "mojo" and/or "hoodoo". According to Hopkinson's website, she prides herself equally on "all of [her] identities": as a black writer, a queer writer, a female writer, a Canadian writer, a Caribbean writer, and as "simply a writer." Skin Folk won the 2002 World Fantasy Award for Best Story Collection and the 2003 Sunburst Award for Canadian Literature of the Fantastic.
Hopkinson was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1960, and "[her] birth family has lived in Jamaica, Trinidad, Guyana, the U.S, and Canada." She was inspired to delve into fantasy and science fiction after reading Gulliver's Travels as a child, but "was[also] reading Homer's Iliad and Kurt Vonnegut by age 10" and "[her] favourite fiction has always been the various forms of fantastical fiction; everything from Caribbean folklore to Ursula K. Le Guin's science fiction and fantasy."
Hopkinson moved to Toronto from Guyana at age 16 and experienced pretty severe culture shock, although the city would later serve as the background for works such as her award-winning first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring. After graduating from Seton Hill University with a Masters of Arts degree in Writing Popular Fiction and studying with her mentor (and famed science fiction author) James K. Morrow, Hopkinson "worked in libraries, as a government culture research officer, aerobics instructor and 'a bunch of other things.'" She started writing science fiction and fantasy around 1993 while employed as a grants officer at the Toronto Arts Council; Brown Girl wasn't published until 1998.
While Skin Folk and several of Hopkinson's subsequent publications have been met with critical acclaim, her career has been far from smooth sailing in recent years: she was "was diagnosed relatively late in life with Adult Attention Deficit Disorder and Non-Verbal Learning Disorder" and, in the six-year period between The New Moon's Arms (2007) and Sister Mine (2013), Hopkinson struggled with "a serious illness [fibromyalgia] that rendered her incapable of working, financially destitute and ultimately homeless". Since 2011, however, her situation has improved and she has been working as Professor of Creative Writing at University of California Riverside.
