Trudier Harris is J. Carlyle Sitterson Professor of English Emerita, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her more than twenty authored and edited books include Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (1984), Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison (1991), Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature (2001), The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997), and Reading Contemporary African American Drama: Fragments of History, Fragments of Self (2007). Her memoir, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, appeared in 2003. Her several teaching awards include the UNC System Board of Governors' Award for Excellence in Teaching (2005). Her latest book, The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South, appeared from LSU Press in 2009. A founding member of the Wintergreen Women Writers Collective, she currently resides in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.