Isiah Lavender III - Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson

Literary Conversations Series

Monika Gehlawat

General Editor

Edited by Isiah Lavender III

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

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Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University,

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Copyright 2023 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lavender, Isiah, III, editor.

Title: Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson / Isiah Lavender III.

Other titles: Literary conversations series.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, 2023. |

Series: Literary conversations series | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022042581 (print) | LCCN 2022042582 (ebook) |

ISBN 9781496843678 (hardback) | ISBN 9781496843685 (trade paperback) |

ISBN 9781496843692 (epub) | ISBN 9781496843708 (epub) |

ISBN 9781496843715 (pdf) | ISBN 9781496843722 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Hopkinson, NaloInterviews. | African American women

authors20th centuryInterviews. | African American women authors

21st centuryInterviews.

Classification: LCC PR9199.3.H5927 C66 2023 (print) | LCC PR9199.3.H5927 (ebook) |

DDC 813/.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042581

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022042582

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

Books by Nalo Hopkinson

Brown Girl in the Ring (Warner Aspect, 1998)

Midnight Robber (Warner Aspect, 2000)

Skin Folk (Warner Aspect, 2001)

The Salt Roads (Warner Books, 2003)

The New Moons Arms (Grand Central Publishing, 2007)

The Chaos (Margaret K. McElderry Books, 2012)

Report from Planet Midnight (PM Press, 2012)

Sister Mine (Grand Central Publishing, 2013)

Falling in Love with Hominids (Tachyon Publications, 2015)

Books Edited by Nalo Hopkinson

Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (Invisible Cities Press, 2000)

Mojo: Conjure Stories (Warner Aspect, 2003)

So Long Been Dreaming, coedited with Uppinder Mehan (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004)

Tesseracts Nine: New Canadian Speculative Fiction, coedited with Geoff Ryman (EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, 2005)

People of Colo(u)r Destroy Science Fiction, coedited with Kristine Ong Muslim (Lightspeed Magazine, 2016)

Particulates, coedited with Rita McBride (Dia Art Foundation, 2018)

Charles Brown / 1999

Gregory E. Rutledge / 1999

Mary Anne Mohanraj / 2000

Christian Wolff / 2001

James Schellenberg and David M. Switzer / 2001

Charles Brown / 2001

Dianne D. Glave / 2001

Jen Watson-Aifah / 2001

Alondra Nelson / 2002

Isiah Lavender III / 2005

Michael Lohr / 2007

Nancy Johnston / 2008

Paul Jarvey / 2011

Terry Bisson / 2012

David Barr Kirtley / 2013

Gary K. Wolfe and Jonathan Strahan / 2013

Jessica FitzPatrick / 2015

Tiffany Davis / 2017

Avni Sejpal / 2017

Mary Anne Mohanraj / 2019

Isiah Lavender III / 2021

When Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson burst on to the science fiction scene with Brown Girl in the Ring in 1998, she seemingly single-handedly reinvigorated interest in Black science fiction (SF). Afrofuturism had not caught fire at this point, but Hopkinson did. She grabbed the attention of the SF community with her Caribbean-inspired science fiction, fantasy, and magical realism. Hopkinson represents the obvious first link in Octavia Butlers legacy. Now a professor of creative writing at the University of British Columbia and a frequent instructor at the Clarion Workshop for Science Fiction writers, Hopkinson is well placed to influence the emerging generations of speculative fiction writers.

Arguably, among her six published novels, three short story collections, six edited collections, and one comics series, the best known remain Brown Girl in the Ring (1998) and Midnight Robber (2000). The first excitingly mixes Afro-Caribbean folklore, organ theft, gangs, and a single, Black teenage mother protagonist within a dystopian Toronto, and the second features an entire Black Caribbean planet named Toussaint, interdimensional travel, and a cyberpunk feel interwoven with Caribbean myth as a young Black girl comes of age. In both novels, if not all of her work, Hopkinson strongly critiques the dilemmas of modern Black life and empowers Black people, specifically women, to create their own futures.

Hopkinson has won multiple awards for her writing and editing achievements beginning with The Astounding Award for Best New Writer in 1999 for Brown Girl in the Ring as well as the Locus Award for Best First Novel. Her first collection of short stories, Skin Folk, won her the World Fantasy Award in 2003, featuring dark fantasies and haunting technologies as Hopkinson pondered modern existence through speculative modes. Her third novel, The Salt Roads, won the Gaylactic Spectrum Award in 2004 for exploring queer issues within speculative fiction in a positive way. In recent years, Hopkinson has turned her attention to writing for an ongoing comic book series in Neil Gaimans Sandman Universe, specifically House of Whispers. All of Hopkinsons singular fictions reflect her interests in raced, gendered, and queered identities from a Caribbean perspective permeated by the folklore of her youth.

As one of the founding members of the Carl Brandon Society (1999), an organization devoted to Black indigenous people of color (BIPOC) speculative fiction started at WisCon: The Feminist Science Fiction Conference, Hopkinson has always had a vested interest in expanding racial and ethnic diversity in all facets of speculative fiction from its writers to its readers. Her editing work demonstrates her abiding support of BIPOC writers by providing opportunities for readers to engage with the Caribbean legends inspired by African belief systems and postcolonial future visions as seen in her anthology Whispers from the Cotton Tree Root: Caribbean Fabulist Fiction (2000). Further, Hopkinson breaks critical ground with So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction & Fantasy (2004), coedited with Uppinder Mehan, as the first anthology featuring the stories of multiethnic authors who imagine futures from a third world perspective where the natives are colonized. Hopkinson also coedited, with Kristine Ong Muslim, the