Melinda Vandenbeld Giles is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto and lecturer in Social Anthropology and Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies. She has published an edited collection titled Mothering in the Age of Neoliberalism (2014), and will be co-editing a Companion to Motherhood forthcoming in 2018. Clara Awake, inspired by her graduate research on African-Brazilian religions, is her debut novel.