The Norton Anthology of African American Literature - Softcover

The much-anticipated Third Edition brings together the work of 140 writers from 1746 to the present writing in all genres, as well as performers of vernacular forms—from spirituals and sermons to jazz and hip hop. Fresh scholarship, new visuals and media, and new selections—with an emphasis on contemporary writers—combine to make The Norton Anthology of African American Literature an even better teaching tool for instructors and an unmatched value for students.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Ph.D.Cambridge), is Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and American Research, Harvard University. He is the author of Life Upon These Shores: Looking at African American History, 1513-2008; Black in Latin America; Tradition and the Black Atlantic: Critical Theory in the African Diaspora; Faces of America; Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the Racial Self; The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Criticism; Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars; Colored People: A Memoir; The Future of Race with Cornel West; Wonders of the African World; Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man; and The Trials of Phillis Wheatley. His is also the writer, producer, and narrator of PBS documentaries Finding Your Roots; Black in Latin America; Faces of America; African American Lives 1 and 2; Looking for Lincoln; America Beyond the Color Line; and Wonders of the African World. He is the editor of African American National Biography with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, and The Dictionary of African Biography with Anthony Appiah; Encyclopedia Africana with Anthony Appiah; and The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, as well as editor-in-chief of TheRoot.com.

Valerie Smith (Ph.D. University of Virginia), General Editor. Dean of the College, Woodrow Wilson Professor of Literature, professor of English and African American Studies, and founding director of the Center for African American Studies, Princeton University. 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. Editor of several works, including Representing Blackness: Issues in Film and Video; African-American Writers; and New Essays on Song of Solomon.

William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is general editor of Wisconsin Studies in Autobiography and The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology, and co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Other works include the Norton Critical Edition of Up From Slavery; The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt; To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro- American Autobiography, 1760-1865; Sisters of the Spirit; The Curse of Caste by Julia C. Collins; Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave; and Slave Narratives after Slavery.

Kimberly Benston (Ph.D. Yale University), Editor, The Black Arts Era. Francis B. Gummere Professor of English, former provost and director of the Hurford Center for Arts and Humanities, Haverford College. Author of Performing Blackness: Enacting African-American Modernism and Baraka: The Renegade and the Mask. Editor of several works, including Speaking for You: Ralph Ellison's Cultural Vision; Larry Neal: A Callaloo Anthology; Baraka: A Collection of Essays; and the forthcoming books Malcolm X: A Critical Casebook; Who Blew Up America?: African-American Culture and the Crisis of 'Terrorism'; and the Norton Critical Edition of H. G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau.

Brent Hayes Edwards (Ph.D. Columbia University), Editor, The Harlem Renaissance. Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University. Author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism, awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association, the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies, and runner-up for the James Russell Lowell Prize of the Modern Language Association; and the forthcoming Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination. Co-editor of Uptown Conversation: The New Jazz Studies and the journal Social Text.