Sharon Lynette Jones is chair of the Department of Women's, Gender, and African American Studies and professor of English at Ball State University. She is author of Rereading the Harlem Renaissance: Race, Class, and Gender in the Fiction of Jessie Fauset, Zora Neale Hurston, and Dorothy West and Critical Companion to Zora Neale Hurston: A Literary Reference to Her Life and Work. She is editor of Critical insights: Zora Neale Hurston and coeditor of The Prentice Hall Anthology of African American Literature.