The Norton Anthology of African American Literature brings together an extraordinary array vast in scope and deep in cultural and historical significance. Preeminent scholar and public intellectual Henry Louis Gates Jr., who presided over the book's creation in the 1990s, continues as general editor, working with a team of highly respected and creative period editors to keep the anthology teachable, up to date, and authoritative. This long-anticipated Fourth Edition, available in both print and ebook formats, introduces new works in every period, in particular a generous selection of the brilliant writing by African Americans in the twenty-first century. with Student Site 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 . Frances Smith Foster is the Charles Howard Candler Professor of English and Women's Studies at Emory University. She is the Editor of The Literature of the Reconstruction to the New Negro Renaissance and co-editor of The Literature of Slavery and Freedom . She is the author of "Til Death or Distance Do Us Part" Love and Marriage in African America; Written by Herself: Literary Production by African American Women, 1746-1892 ; and Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Antebellum Slave Narrative . She is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature and Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and editor of several works, including Love and Marriage in Early African America; Minnie's Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper ; Elizabeth Keckley's Behind the Scenes ; and the Norton Critical Edition of Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl . Brent Hayes Edwards (Ph.D. Columbia University), is the Peng Family Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He is the author of The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism , which was awarded the John Hope Franklin Prize of the American Studies Association and the Gilbert Chinard Prize of the Society for French Historical Studies; and the forthcoming Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imagination . He is editor of PMLA .