Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is a prize-winning author and documentarian, as well as host of Finding Your Roots on PBS.   

Valerie Smith is the president of Swarthmore College. She is the 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.  

William L.Andrews is co-editor of  The Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Other works include the Norton Critical Edition of  Up From Slavery; The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt; and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865.  

Frances Foster has edited and authored many works, including Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative and the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. 

Brent Hayes Edwards’s The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies. 

Deborah McDowell is the co-editor with of  Slavery of the Literary Imagination; author of  "The Changing Same”: Studies in Fiction by Black Women; Leaving the Pipe Shop: Memories of Kin; and editor of Larsen's Quicksand and Passing, Fauset's Plum Bun, and Hopkins’s Of One Blood.

Hortense Spillers is the author of the essay collection Black, White, and in Color and editor of Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the Modern Text; and co-editor of  Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and the Literary Tradition.   

Kim Benston is the author of  Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask and Performing Blackness: Enactments of African-American Modernism. 

Farah Jasmine Griffin 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.

Jesse McCarthy has published articles and reviews in transposition, NOVEL, and  African American Review and contributed chapters to Richard Wright in Context and Ralph Ellison in Context. He is the author of Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? and a novel, The Fugitivities.