In addition, Hopkins is known for her significant contributions as editor for the Colored American Magazine, which was recognized as being among the first periodicals specifically celebrating African-American culture through short stories, essays and serial novels.

In addition to hailing from a well-educated household, she was inspired from an early age by African-American leaders of the time, such as Frederick Douglass, whom she later cited as having "god-like gifts" in her recollection of attending one of his talks during adolescence.

[4] In 1874, after completing her second year at Girls High School, she entered an essay contest held by the Congregational Publishing Society of Boston and funded by former slave, novelist, and dramatist William Wells Brown.

[5] Afterwards, she wrote another unpublished play titled One Scene from the Drama of Early Days, which was dramatized rendition of the biblical story of Daniel in the lions' den.

She explored the difficulties faced by African Americans amid the racist violence of post-Civil War America in her first novel, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, published in 1900.

In the following years, she published three serial novels between 1901 and 1903 in the African-American periodical Colored American Magazine: Hagar's Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, and Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self.

[7]Of One Blood: Or, The Hidden Self tells the story of Reuel Briggs, a medical student who does not care about being black or appreciating African history, but finds himself in Ethiopia on an archaeological trip.

This series gave recognition to many of the influential Black figures of the time through detailing their lives and legacies, including abolitionist William Wells Brown, the same inspiration who had awarded her for her essay-writing ability as a teenager nearly three decades earlier.

[5] By her final issue, a total of six of Hopkins' short stories had been published in the magazine, including the well-known mystery "Talma Gordon", as well as two of her novels, Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest and Of One Blood or The Hidden Self.

Despite its attempts to provide a space appealing to the literary and political interests of African-Americans in the context of the segregation era, the magazine only published two issues in 1916 before ceasing existence and receiving very little recognition within scholarly discourse at the time.

It was hailed as being "...undoubtedly the book of the century.... absorbing from the first page to the last" by president of the Colored Women's Business Club of Chicago, Alberta Moore Smith.

[9] In 1988, Oxford University Press released The Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers with Professor Henry Louis Gates as the general editor of the series.

Hopkins' novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (with an introduction by Richard Yarborough) was reprinted as a part of this series.

[5] On August 12, 1930, she died from injuries sustained after an accident, during which bandages that she was wearing on her arms to treat her neuritis, soaked in liniment, caught aflame from an oil stove that she had in her room.