Merle Collins is a professor of comparative literature and English at the University of Maryland. She is the author of the poetry collections Because the Dawn Breaks and Rotten Pomerack, the novels Angel and The Colour of Forgetting, and the short story collection Rain Darling. 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.