CONTRIBUTORS

The editor is most grateful to Patty Jasper-Zellner for her tireless efforts in assisting with the preparation of this text.

Giselle Liza Anatol is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kansas. She is currently completing a book-length manuscript on representations of motherhood in contemporary Caribbean women’s literature and has published on the work of Lorene Cary, Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, Audre Lorde, and Paule Marshall. Her edited collection on J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, was published by Greenwood Press (2003).

Herman Beavers is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of two books, A Neighborhood of Feeling (1986), and Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (1995). He has completed a collection of poems entitled Still Life with Guitar and is currently working on And Bid Him Sing, which examines representations of susceptibility and shame in twentieth-century African American writing by black male writers.

Keith Byerman is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Indiana State University and Associate Editor of African American Review. He has taught courses in African American and Southern literature and culture at the University of Texas, University of Vienna, and Columbus College in Georgia. He is the author of several books and articles, including works on Alice Walker, W. E. B. Du Bois, John Edgar Wideman, and folklore in contemporary fiction.

Susanne B. Dietzel is the Director of the Women’s Resource Center at Loyola University, New Orleans. Her publications have appeared in Feminist Teacher, Southern Quarterly, The History of Southern Women’s Literature, and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature.

M. Giulia Fabi is the author of Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel (2001) and the editor of a series of Italian translations of African American novels. She is tenured Assistant Professor of American Literature at the University of Ferrara, Italy.

Maryemma Graham is Professor of English at the University of Kansas and founder/director of the Project on the History of Black Writing. She has published extensively on American and African American literature and culture and has directed numerous national and international workshops and institutes on literature, literary history, criticism, and pedagogy. Her most recent books include Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker (2001) and Conversations with Margaret Walker (2002). She is currently completing The House Where My Soul Lives, the authorized biography of Walker.

Fritz Gysin has just retired as Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Berne, Switzerland. Author of numerous articles and two books on American and African American literature, he most recently edited Apocalypse (2001) and (with Christopher Mulvey) Black Liberation in the Americas (2001).

George Hutchinson is the author of The Ecstatic Whitman (1986) and The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (1995). He is the Booth M. Tarkington Professor of Literary Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington.

Lovalerie King is Assistant Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University and has published a number of critical essays, articles, and reviews on African American literature. She recently completed A Students’ Guide to African American Literature: Fiction and is currently revising for publication The African American Literary Countertext on Theft, Race, and Ethics.

Marilyn Mobley McKenzie is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at George Mason University and is the author of Folk Roots and Mythic Wings in Sarah Orne Jewett and Toni Morrison: The Cultural Function of Narrative (1992) published under her former name, Marilyn Sanders Mobley. She is currently completing a book on Toni Morrison entitled Spaces for Readers: Toni Morrison’s Narrative Poetics and Cultural Politics.

Christopher Mulvey is Professor of English and American Studies at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He is author of Anglo-American Landscapes (1983) and Transatlantic Manners (1990). With John Simons he edited New York: City as Text (1990), and with Fritz Gysin, he edited Black Liberation in the Americas (2001).

Pierre-Damien Mvuyekure is Associate Professor of English and African American Literature at the University of Northern Iowa and has published on Ishmael Reed, Alice Walker, Jewell Parker Rhodes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Melvin Tolson, Patricia Grace, and Velma Pollard.

Claudine Raynaud is Professor of English and American literature at the University of François-Rabelais, Tours, France where she heads the research program in English (GRAAT). She has published articles on African American autobiography in English and French and is author of Toni Morrison: L’Esthétique de la Survie. She is currently completing a manuscript on Hurston’s autobiographical selves and on Morrison and memory.

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy is Professor of African American Studies and English at Wesleyan University. He is the author of The Empty Garden: The Subject of Late Milton (1992), Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (1999), and Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (2001).

Steven C. Tracy is the author of several books, including Langston Hughes and the Blues, and editor of Write Me a Few of Your Lines: A Blues Reader (1999) and the forthcoming A Historical Guide to Langston Hughes and A Historical Guide to Ralph Ellison. A blues singer and harmonica player, he is Professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Jerry W. Ward Jr. is Professor of English and African World Studies at Dillard University. He is compiler and editor of Trouble the Water: 250 Years of African American Poetry (1997) and editor of Redefining American Literary History (1990) with A. LaVonne Ruoff and Black Southern Voices (1992). A poet and frequent contributor to journals and anthologies, he is currently completing Delta Narratives: Memory, Testimony and Social Change with Kim Lacy Rogers.