Ivy G. Wilson is an associate professor of English and the director of the Program in American Studies at Northwestern University, where he teaches courses on the comparative literatures of the black diaspora with a particular emphasis on African American culture. He is the author of Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetics of Politics in the Antebellum U.S., the editor of At the Dusk of Dawn: Selected Poetry and Prose of Albery Allson Whitman, and the coeditor of The Works of James M. Whitfield: “America” and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet. He lives in Chicago.