Andrews, William L.: - William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is general editor of Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Other works include the Norton Critical Edition of Up From Slavery; The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt; To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro- American Autobiography, 1760-1865; Sisters of the Spirit; The Curse of Caste by Julia C. Collins; Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave; and Slave Narratives after Slavery.
Benston, Kimberly: - Kimberly W. Benston is Francis B. Gummere Professor of English at Haverford College, where he has also served as director of the Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities, provost, and the fifteenth president, and from which he received the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching. His books include Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask and Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. He is editor of Imamu Amiri Baraka: A Collection of Critical Essays, Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, Larry Neal: Essays, the "Performance" Special Issue of PMLA, and the "Black Arts Movement" section of The Norton Anthology of African American Literature.
Edwards, Brent Hayes: - Brent Hayes Edwards (Ph.D. Columbia University), is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies; and the forthcoming Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. He is editor of PMLA.
Foster, Frances Smith: - Frances Smith Foster is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies at Emory University. She is the Editor of The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance and co-editor of The Literature of Slavery and Freedom. She is the author of "Til Death or Distance Do Us Part" Love and Marriage in African America; Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892; and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative. She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and editor of several works, including Love and Marriage in Early African America; Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper; Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes; and the Norton Critical Edition of Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
Gates, Henry Louis: - Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine: - Farah Jasmine Griffin (Ph.D. Yale), is the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Columbia University. She is the author of Who Set You Flowin'?: The African American Migration Narrative; If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday; Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics During World War II; and Read Until You Understand: New and Selected Essays, among other works.
McCarthy, Jesse: - Jesse McCarthy is Assistant Professor in the departments of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He has published articles and reviews in the journals transposition, NOVEL, and African American Review and contributed chapters to Richard Wright in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2021) and Ralph Ellison in Context (forthcoming) as well as a new introduction for Vincent O. Carter's long out-of-print memoir The Bern Book (Dalkey Archive, 2020). He is also the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? a collection of essays (Liveright, 2021) and a novel, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021).
McDowell, Deborah E.: - Deborah E. McDowell (Ph.D. Purdue) is the Alice Griffin Professor of English, University of Virginia. Founding editor of the Beacon Black Women Writers series; co-editor with Arnold Rampersad of Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of "The Changing Same" Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; editor of Nella Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Jessie Redmon Fauset's Plum Bun, Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, and numerous articles and essays.
Smith, Valerie: - Valerie Smith (Ph.D. University of Virginia), General Editor. Dean of the College, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, professor of English and African American Studies, and founding director of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University. Author of Self-Discovery and Authority in Afro-American Narrative; Not Just Race, Not Just Gender: Black Feminist Readings; and Toni Morrison: Writing the Moral Imagination. Editor of several works, including Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video; African-American Writers; and New Essays on Song of Solomon.
Spillers, Hortense: - Hortense Spillers (Ph.D. Brandeis), Realism, Naturalism, Modernism, Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English, Vanderbilt University. Author of the essay collection Black, White, and in Color. Editor of the collection Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text; co-editor with Marjorie Pryse of Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and the Literary Tradition, and an editor of The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Director of Issues in Critical Investigation (ICI), an initiative to stimulate new scholarship in African diasporic studies, which she founded in 2007; founding editor of The A-Line Journal, A Journal of Progressive Commentary, which she launched in 2013. Recent work has appeared in Callaloo and boundary 2.
