Mae G. Henderson is a professor emerita in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. She is the co-editor of The Josephine Baker Critical Reader: Selected Writings on the Entertainer and Activist (2017) and author of Speaking in Tongues and Dancing Diaspora: Black Women Writing and Performing (2014). 

Jeanne Scheper is an associate professor of Gender & Sexuality Studies at University of California, Irvine. She is the author of Moving Performances: Divas, Iconicity, and Remembering the Modern Stage (Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Gene Melton II is a senior lecturer in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, Raleigh. His work has appeared in Contested Boundaries: New Critical Essays on the Fiction of Toni Morrison (2013).