Harriet E. Wilson (1825–1900) was born in New Hampshire, where she worked from a young age as a servant to an abusive family.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. The author of numerous books, including the widely acclaimed memoir Colored People, Professor Gates has also edited several anthologies and is coeditor with Kwame Anthony Appiah of Encarta Africana, an encyclopedia of the African Diaspora. An influential cultural critic, he is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and other publications and is the recipient of many honors, including a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship and the National Humanities Medal.
Richard J. Ellis is Professor and Chair of the American and Canadian Studies Department at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom. He has published widely on American studies topics. His two most recent monographs are Liar! Liar!—Jack Kerouac Novelist (1999) and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig: A Cultural Biography (2003). He is the editor of Comparative American Studies: An International Journal and currently serves on the ASA's International Committee.
