William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980), To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1986), and Slavery and Class in the American South: A Generation of Slave Narrative Testimony, 1840-1865 (2019). A co-editor of the Norton Anthology of African American Literature and The Oxford Companion to African American Literature, he has edited Chesnutt's Conjure Tales and Stories of the Color Line for Penguin Classics. In 2018 he received the Jay B. Hubbell Medal from the Modern Language Association for lifetime achievement in the study of American Literature.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and Africana Studies at Cornell University, and also tenured at Yale, Duke, and Harvard, where he was appointed W.E.B. DuBois professor of humanities in 1991. Professor Gates is the author of Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self, Wonders of the African World, The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, Loose Cannons: Notes on the Culture Wars, and Colored People: A Memoir. With Cornel West, he co-wrote The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Country and The Future of the Race. He is also the editor of the critically-acclaimed edition of Our Nig, an annotated reprint of Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 novel, The Slave's Narrative (with the late Charles T. Davis), Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African-American Experience, Six Women's Slave Narratives, and In the House of Oshugbo: Critical Essays on Wole Soyinka. He is a recipient of the MacArthur Prize.