Shoto Press's debut author for our Black Seal imprint for fine prose fiction, Cynthia Robinson was born in Tennessee, has lived and traveled extensively abroad, and holds a Ph.D. in Art History from the University of Pennsylvania.

She is an Assistant Professor of Islamic and Medieval Art History at Cornell University. Her publications to date are academic; all center around the visual and literary culture of Al-Andalus (Muslim Spain). Though her upcoming book The Will of Venus is her first novel to be published, she has long had the fiction habit, and two other novels are in preparation for publication by Shoto Press.