Houston A. Baker Jr. is Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South; Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism/Re-reading Booker T.; Black Studies, Rap, and the Academy; Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory, and a number of other studies of African American literature and culture. He is a published poet whose most recent volume is Passing Over.