J.L. Powers, writer and Skyline College English professor, published her fourth novel, “This Thing Called the Future,” on May 1, 2011. It follows the story of a young South African girl named Khosi as she deals with poverty, love and the looming guillotine known as AIDS.

“It’s a coming-of-age story set in post-apartheid South Africa,” Powers says, “and it deals with the HIV/AIDS epidemic and also the clash between Western medicine and traditional healing.”

Powers took much of her past experience as inspiration for this story. She became very interested in South Africa’s traditional healing while acquiring her doctorate in African History from Stanford University. One of the biggest experiences that she drew on, however, was much more personal.

“In 2006, I was living with a Zulu family while I was taking intensive Zulu courses at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg (South Africa). At night, my fourteen- and thirteen-year-old Zulu sisters would come, sit on my bed, and tell me all their secrets, and among those secrets, they’d like to sneak out at night to go to parties, and they were very good girls, so it was kind of a shock to realize they liked to party.

“Unfortunately, at these parties, they would be approached by men who were in their thirties, forties and fifties, and in southern Africa, many epidemiologists understand this is the vast majority of how transmission of HIV occurs: it’s between older men and younger women. So this sugar-daddy phenomenon is an extreme problem in terms of the disease. I grew very concerned about my young sisters.”

As a successful author, Powers can easily see how her characters reflect some of her personality.

“When you’re writing, you have to draw on those parts of yourself that we all share that are human,” Powers said. “In a scene where somebody is having a conflict with their mother, it really doesn’t matter whether they’re seventeen and male or whether they’re fourteen and Zulu, the emotions that we feel when we have a conflict with our mother is sort of universal. They can be varied, but I can still draw on my own experiences.”

The biggest selling point of “This Thing Called the Future” is that there is nothing like it on the market. As Powers puts it, “It deals with the HIV/AIDS epidemic from a perspective that isn’t dealt with in any other book on the American market today.”

Critically acclaimed by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, “This Thing Called the Future” is in stores now.