Rob Nixon began his career as an activist and writer working to dismantle apartheid. In the Preface, Nixon notes that he was heavily influenced by Edward Said as a graduate student at Columbia University in the mid-1980s. While conducting his graduate work, Nixon found himself “confronted with two unappetizing options: to follow either the fusty old formalists, with their patched-tweed Ivy League belle-lettrism, or the hipper new formalists, whose lemming run toward the palisades of deconstruction was then in full spate” (xi). Nixon, who immigrated to the US, was deeply passionate about literature and politics. Said offered him a third path where he could combine both of these passions and still reach various audiences.

Nixon holds a PhD from Columbia University. He is currently the Currie C. and Thomas A. Barron Family Professor in the Humanities and the Environment at Princeton University, but he has held academic positions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Nixon has authored four books, including the award-winning Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon himself has also received numerous accolades, including the MacArthur Foundation Peace and Security Fellowship and the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship. Like many of the writers highlighted in the book, Nixon has published in the fields of environmental and postcolonial studies.