Nadia Nurhussein is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, where she has taught since 2005. She received her PhD in English in 2004 from UC Berkeley and, from 2004 to 2005, was a Visiting Assistant Professor and Postdoctoral Fellow in the English department at Mount Holyoke College. Her research focuses on African-American literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, especially poetry. Her first book, Rhetorics of Literacy: The Cultivation of American Dialect Poetry, is forthcoming from The Ohio State University Press in 2013. As a Beinecke Fellow, she will pursue research on a second book project about the idea of Ethiopia in African-American literature.