William L. Andrews is E. Maynard Adams Professor of English and Senior Associate Dean for Fine Arts and Humanities at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (1980) and To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760-1865 (1986). He is co-editor of The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (2003), and general editor of The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (1998).
Regina E. Mason, Grimes's great-great-great-granddaughter, has spent fifteen years exploring the life and times of autobiographer William Grimes, his wife, their children, and the communities in which they lived. She enjoys genealogy and resides in the San Francisco Bay Area with her family.