Susanna Ashton is a Professor of English at Clemson University. She has held a teaching and research Fulbright fellowship in Ireland and in 2011 was awarded Clemson University's Provost Prize for Mentoring and Teaching with Creative Inquiry. She has authored and edited a number of books about American Literary Culture and African American writing, including I Belong to South Carolina: South Carolina Slave Narratives (and with coeditor Rhondda R. Thomas), The South Carolina Roots of African American Thought both from the University of South Carolina Press. Her research has been published in College English, MELUS, Commonplace, Symploke, Biography, Studies in the Novel and others. Currently she is at work on A Plausible Man--a biography of fugitive slave, activist and author, John Andrew Jackson. Bill Hardwig is an associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in the English Department at the University of Tennessee. He has won the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Teaching and the College of Arts and Sciences Excellence in Advising awards. His research interests include local color literature, periodical culture, and regional writers, from Mary Murfree and Charles Chesnutt to Cormac McCarthy. His book Upon Provincialism: Southern Literature and National Periodical Culture, 1870-1900 was published by the University of Virginia Press in 2013. He has also published work on the reception and publishing history of Chesnutt's fiction, as well as the teaching of his literature.