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  • Contributors

Barry D. Amis was a professor at Michigan State and Purdue universities and a Fulbright scholar in France, Cameroon, and Niger. Currently he lives and writes in Alexandria, Virginia.

Rane Arroyo (1954-2010) began his writing career as a performance artist. He was also a playwright, fiction writer and poet. He taught creative writing at the University of Toledo and served on the Board of Directors for the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). Arroyo's work earned several awards, including the John Ciardi Poetry Prize, the Carl Sandburg Poetry Prize, an Ohio Arts Council Award for Excellence in Poetry, a Pushcart Prize, and the Hart Crane Poetry Prize.

Shanna Greene Benjamin is an assistant professor of English at Grinnell College, where she teaches African American and American literature and culture. Her current research projects include "Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: Texts and/as Textiles of African American Women, "Variations on a Theme: Wanda Coleman and the African American Sonnet Tradition," and "A Context for Creation: Kara Walker's Harper's History of the Civil War (Annotated)." She is also at work on a biography of Nellie Y. McKay.

Jonathan Daigle is assistant professor of English at the University of Hartford's Hillyer College. He wishes to remember Nellie McKay, who introduced him to Dunbar's work, and to thank Thomas Schaub, Craig Werner, and David Zimmerman for their thoughtful comments.

Kate Dossett is a senior lecturer in American history at the University of Leeds. She was the winner of the 2009 Julia Cherry Spruill Prize for her book Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935 (UP of Florida, 2008). She is currently completing a monograph "Stages in the Struggle: Black Theatre and Politics in 1930s America." She would like to thank Robert Jones for reading numerous drafts of this article as well as the anonymous readers for the journal. She would also like to thank James Hatch and the late Lorraine Brown for sharing their insights and collections on Theodore Ward.

Chi Elliott, a Cave Canem fellow, lives in Oakland, California. She received a Ph.D. in American studies at the University of Texas, and an M. F. A. in poetry at the Warren Wilson College Program for Writers. She has published in Callaloo, Notre Dame Review, and MARGIE.

Tim Engles is a professor in the English department at Eastern Illinois University. He would like to thank Hugh Ruppersburg and Tricia Lottens for their careful attention to drafts of this article.

Alan King is a poet and journalist, living in the D.C. metropolitan area. His poems have appeared in Alehouse, Audience, Boxcar Poetry Review, Indiana Review, MiPoesias, and RATTLE, among others. He is also the senior program director for the D.C. Creative Writing Workshop, a Cave Canem fellow, and VONA alumnus. He has been nominated for both a Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net selection. His first collection of poems, Drift, will be published in 2012.

Michael Kuelker is professor of English at St. Charles Community College in Cottleville, Missouri. He is the editor of Book of Memory: A Rastafari Testimony (CaribSound, 2005), the spiritual autobiography of Jamaican Rasta elder Prince Elijah Williams. He also hosts "Positive Vibrations," a weekly reggae program on KDHX 88.1 FM in St. Louis, Missouri. [End Page 789]

Michael Lackey is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota, Morris, and teaches courses in twentieth-century literature. He has published articles in numerous journals, including Philosophy and Literature, Journal of the History of Ideas, Callaloo, Modern Fiction Studies, Comparative Critical Studies, and Journal of Modern Literature. He is also the author of African American Atheists and Political Liberation: A Study of the Socio-Cultural Dynamics of Faith (UP of Florida, 2007), which was named a "Choice Outstanding Academic Title" for 2007. Forthcoming are The Modernist God State: A Literary Study of the Nazis' Christian Reich and an intellectual biography of J. Saunders Redding.

Nathaniel Mackey is the author of four books of poetry, the most recent of which is Splay Anthem (New Directions, 2006); an ongoing prose work, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, whose fourth and most recent...

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