This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Before she started writing, Nettia Corafer was a young athlete and a very good one.

Yeah, I played semi-pro tennis, and, you know, I was a track star, all of that.

She began writing when she was in college, after her life had changed suddenly and profoundly.

I first started telling stories after a really, you know, traumatic kind of thing, because

it was like I was an athlete and then I had to have

this spinal surgery that left me. There were complications and the main complication was it left

me paralyzed from the waist down. But the way that I brought myself from the darkness

during all of that was, you know, I found storytelling.

I haven't stopped writing since I started writing in that hospital bed.

As soon as I discovered it, it's what I do.

O'Corifer regained her ability to walk and kept on writing.

She got a PhD in literature and began to publish.

She's the author now of a long list of fantasy and sci-fi books for adults and young adults,

along with Black Panther comics for Marvel.

And her book, Akata Woman, comes out this month.

It's the third in a series.

It's about a teenager named Sunny, who's Nigerian American, just like O'Corpher herself.

But Sunny has moved to Nigeria, and she's discovered that she's got magical powers.

Nettia Corafer spoke recently with the New Yorker's Vincent Cunningham.

The modes that you work in, science fiction and fantasy, how did you arrive in that place? I grew up reading everything. I had this kind of weird habit of going into the library and not looking at the

category. You know, I didn't know when I migrated into the adult section. I didn't, I was just like

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