A. Robert Lee was a Professor in the English department at Nihon University, Tokyo from 1997 to 2011. He previously taught at the University of Kent, UK. His recent books include Multicultural American Literature: Comparative Black, Native, Latino/a and Asian American Fictions (2003), which won the American Book Award in 2004, and, with Mark Gresham, Japan Textures: Sight and Word (2007).