The Editor: Carol E. Henderson is Associate Professor of African American and American Literatures at the University of Delaware, Newark. She received her Ph.D. in American literature from the University of California, Riverside. In addition to numerous articles in professional journals, and essays in two critical volumes on novelist Ann Petry, she is the author of Scarring the Black Body: Race and Representation in African American Literature (2002) and the recipient of several professional and research awards.