: J.L.Powers : J.L.Powers : J.L.Powers : J.L.Powers Powers is a novelist as well as a researcher. This Thing Called the Future, her most recent work, is a coming-of-age story set in post-apartheid South Africa. Labor Pains and Birth Tales was her previous compilation. She earned master's degrees at African history from the State University of New York-Albany and Stanford University, was awarded a Fulbright-Hayes grant to study Zulu in South Africa, and spent 2008 and 2009 as a visiting scholar in Stanford's African Studies Department. She resides in the Bay Area in San Francisco.