Meredith Ann Pierce was born July 5, 1958, in Seattle, Washington, and recalls living a "reasonably miserable" childhood in California, Illinois, and Texas. When she was fifteen, a short story she wrote won a national creative writing contest. Later, she earned a master's degree in creative writing from the University of Florida. She is currently a children's librarian in Gainesville, Florida, where she has lived for the last fifteen years. She is at work on Dark Moon, the second volume of her unicorn trilogy, which began with The Birth of Firebringer.

Pierce finds her subjects in interesting ways. The Darkangel stems from a dream that the psychologist Carl Jung describes in his book Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Although the description of the dream is only a page and a half long, Pierce uses it as the basis of her entire novel. In a similar way, The Woman...