Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the W.E.B. Du Bois Professor of Humanities and chair of the Department of Afro-American Studies at Harvard University. He has been the editor of such collections as Reading Black, Reading Feminist, The Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, the forty-volume Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers 1910-1940, and the series editor of the complete works of Zora Neale Hurston. He is the author of The Signifying Monkey, which received the American Book Award, Figures in Black, and the memoir Colored People, among other books. A staff writer for The New Yorker, he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.