Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was the author of several short stories and two novels, Quicksand and Passing. She received a Guggenheim Fellowship to write a third novel in 1930 but, unable to find a publisher for it, she disappeared from the literary scene and worked as a nurse in New York City.Ntozake Shange is an American playwright and poet. Shange is a black feminist and a critic of the Black Arts Movement. She majored in American Studies at Barnard and earned a master's degree in the same field at UCLA. Her most famous work, for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, moved from Off-Broadway to Broadway and won the Obie Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, and the AUDELCO Award.Mae Henderson is a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of numerous articles on pedagogy, diasporic writing and performance, cultural studies and cultural criticism, as well as black feminist criticism and theory. Her essay "Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer's Literary Tradition" has been widely anthologized. Henderson is also the editor of Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology and Borders, Boundaries and Frames, and coeditor (with John Blassingame) of the five-volume Antislavery Newspapers and Periodicals: An Annotated Index of Letters, 1817-1871.