Dr. Venetria K. Patton is Director of African American Studies and Research Center and Associate Professor of English at Purdue University. Dr. Patton is the author of Women in Chains: The Legacy of Slavery in Black Women’s Fiction (2000), the coeditor of Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology (2001), and editor of Teaching American Literature: Background Readings (2006). She is currently working on The Grasp That Reaches Beyond the Grave: The Ancestral Call in Black Women’s Texts.