Merle Collins is a professor of comparative literature and English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of Angel, Because the Dawn Breaks, The Colour of Forgetting, Rain Darling, and Rotten Pomerack. Her critical works have appeared in From My Guy to Sci-Fi: Genre and Women's Writing in the Postmodern World and Slavery and Abolition. Her literary work has appeared in Penguin Modern Poets Volume 8 and The Oxford Book of Caribbean Short Stories.