KAREN HILL was born in Newmarket, Ontario, in 1958, and grew up in Toronto. After graduating from the University of Ottawa, she moved to West Berlin in 1979, where she stayed for nearly a decade. She became an avid traveller and spoke English, French, Spanish and German. Later, she returned to Toronto, where she raised her daughter Malaika Hill and administered an English as a second language program for the Toronto School Board and worked for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation. Like her parents, Daniel and Donna Hill, and siblings, Lawrence and Dan, she wrote creatively and felt passionately about issues of gender, race and culture. She also struggled throughout her life with bipolar disorder. Karen worked for more than twenty years on Cafe Babanussa, which she had finished and was showing to publishers when she died in 2014.