Renee Blake is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at New York University. Her research interests include Urban sociolinguistics, African American Vernacular English, and languages and cultures of the Caribbean. Her publications include "Barbadian Creole English: Insights into Class and Race Identity," Journal of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies (1996) and "Resolving the Don't Count Cases in the Quantitative Analyses of the Copula in African American Vernacular English," Language Variation and Change (1996).

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Jennifer Bloomquist is an Assistant Professor and Coordinator of Africana Studies at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania. Her research interests include dialectology, language contact and variation, and African American Englishes in isolation. Her publications include “Developmental Trends in Semantic Acquisition: Evidence from Over-Extensions in Child Language,” First Language (to appear November 2007), as well as “Can the Achievement Gap be Linked to Differences in the Sophistication of Naming Strategies? A Comparison of African American and European American Children's Responses on a Picture-Labeling Task,” and “Dialect Differences in Central Pennsylvania: A Socio-Historical Account of Regional Dialect Use and Adaptation by African American Speakers in the Lower Susquehanna Valley,” both forthcoming.

Anne Charity is Director of the Linguistics Lab at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA, where she is also an Assistant Professor in the Department of English. Her publications include “Standardized Assessment of African-American Children: A Sociolinguistic Perspective.” Ethnolinguistic Diversity and Literacy Education . Farr M., Seloni L., Song, J., eds. (Earlbaum, in press), “African American English.” Handbook of African-American Psychology . Neville, H., Tynes, B., and Utsey, S., eds. (Sage, in press), and “Regional Differences in low-SES African-American Children's Speech in The School Setting.” Language Variation and Change . (2007).

H. Samy Alim is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Recent works include  Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture  (Routledge, 2006),  Tha Global Cipha: Hip Hop Culture and Consciousness  (with James G. Spady and Samir Meghelli, Black History Museum, 2006),  You Know My Steez  (Duke, 2004), and Talkin Black Talk: Language, Education, and Social Change (with John Baugh, Teachers College Press, 2007). His research interests include sociolinguistics, style theory and methodology, language and identity, language and race(ism), the language and literacy development of marginalized populations, and Global Hip Hop Culture(s).  

Lanita Jacobs-Huey is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her research interests include African American women's discourse, anthropology of the body, language & identity in diasporas, and language & gender. Her publications include From the Kitchen to the Parlor: Language and Becoming in African American Women's Hair Care (Oxford UP, 2006), “The Arab is the New Nigger: African American Comics Confront the Irony and Tragedy of September 11,” Transforming Anthropology . (2006), and “The Natives are Gazing and Talking Back: Reviewing the Problematics of Positionality, Voice, and Accountability among ŒNative' Anthropologists,” American Anthropologist (2002).

Charles DeBose is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at California State University, East Bay, and an ordained minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His scholarly interests include sociolinguistics, language planning and policy, and translation theory. He is author of The Sociology of African American Languag e: A Language Planning Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Speech, Language, Learning, and the African American Child, co-authors Jean Van Keulen and Gloria Weddington (Allyn and Bacon, 1998;), and a number of book chapters, journal articles and reviews.

Peggy Jones is currently an Assistant Professor, Graduate Faculty Member, and Interim Chairperson of the University of Nebraska at Omaha (UNO) Black Studies Department. She is also a Senior Research Fellow and the College of Arts and Science Representative for the Institute for Collaboration Science. This summer she submitted a co-authored article for publication titled “Toward Achieving the Beloved Community : Lessons for Applied Business Research and Practice from the Teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr.” She is currently transitioning from purely studio-based creative activity to doing more “creative research.” Via a multidisciplinary-based illustrated creative non-fiction (autoethnography), she plans to explore the intersections between language and the following: 1) Internal and external racial identity/White privilege; 2) Socio-economic class and status; and 3) Media (mis)representations of AAE. She received an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Nebraska Arts Council for her play, “The Journey,” which tells the story of the first black graduate from the art department at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 1922, Aaron Douglas. She is currently working on a number of projects, including the development of a graphic novel about a black female superhero.

Sonja Lanehart is the Brackenridge Endowed Chair for the Department of English at the University of Texas, San Antonio. Her research interests include Sociolinguistics, language and literacy in the African American community, language and identity, and English language variation and standardization. Her publications include Roswell Voices , with William Kretzschmar, Becky Childs and Bridget Anderson (Roswell Folk and Heritage Bureau, 2004), Sista, Speak! Black Women Kinfolk Talk about Language and Literacy, (University of Texas Press, 2002), and Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English, (John Benjamins, 2001).

Joycelyn Moody is the Sue E. Denman Distinguished Chair in American Literature at the University of Texas, San Antonio. She is also Editor in Chief of African American Review. She has published on African American autobiography, slavery, and US women's writings. She is author of Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (U of Georgia Press, 2000), and Teaching with the Norton Anthology of African American Literature (Norton, 2004).

Terry Meier is an associate professor in the Language and Literacy Department at Wheelock College in Boston , Massachusetts . Her major area of interest is literacy achievement in urban schools. She is the recent author of Black Communications and Learning to Read: Building on Children's Linguistic and Cultural Strengths (Lawrence Erlbaum, 2008). She has also written articles on the topic of African American English and literacy instruction that have appeared in various collected volumes.

Marcyliena Morgan is Associate Professor of Communications at Stanford University where she is the Executive Director of Stanford's Hiphop Archive. Her research focuses on youth, gender, language, culture and identity, sociolinguistics, discourse and interaction. She is the author of Language, Discourse and Power in African American Culture (Cambridge UP, 2002) and Editor of Language and the Social Construction of Identity in Creole Situations (UCLA, 1994). She is currently completing a book on hiphop culture entitled The Real Hiphop - Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the Underground . Dr. Morgan will be relocating to Harvard University Spring 2008.

Calaya Reid is a PhD Candidate at Georgia State University, and is an Instructor at Clark Atlanta University. She is also the former Editor of Rolling Out Magazine. Her research interests include aspects of contemporary African American culture and fiction, creative writing, and culturally relevant pedagogy (composition). Her first novel, Take Her Man (Kensington 2007), was chosen for the REAL Author Real Ladies Read 2007 Author Search and the 2007 Zora Neale Hurston Literary Conference. Her second novel, His First Wife, is due out in November of 2008.

Iyabo Osiapem is an Assistant Professor for the English Department at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA.
Her research interests include language use in the African American community and its relationship to other African Diaspora varieties, especially Black Bermudian English, as well as in research methodologies.

Mackenzie Price is in her fourth year at Stanford University and will be receiving a B.A in Linguistics this June. After graduation she plans to begin the pursuit of a doctorate in Applied Linguistics. She is a student of John Rickford and is currently working on an honors project dealing with changes in the use of AAVE features over time.

Renée Price is currently an Advisor and Teacher of History at St. Catherine's School in Richmond, VA. She has been working in education for over ten years and has received numerous awards for her distinguished teaching and service. Her research interests include African, American, Arab, and European Histories as well as community outreach programs.

Angela Rickford Angela E. Rickford is an Associate Professor of Education at San Jose State University in California. She received her BA (Special Honors) degree in English from the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, her MSc in Education from the University of Pennsylvania, her Ph. D in Education from Stanford University, and her Diploma in Education (Teaching Credentials) with distinction from the University of Guyana in South America. Her area of expertise is literacy development among ethnically diverse student populations. For the past 6 years she has directed a federally funded grant designed to help teachers improve their skill in teaching Reading. She has also been a reading consultant to several organizations in California including the Consortium on Reading Excellence and the Oakland Unified School District under the Governor's Initiative. She has published several articles in journals and edited volumes in addition to a 1999 book on teaching reading comprehension to ethnic minority students.

Jacquelyn Rahman is Assistant Professor and Director of Linguistics for the Department of English at Miami University in Oxford, OH.
Her research interests include the intersection of social class with regional and ethnic identity, standard and vernacular varieties of African American English: structure, social contexts, verbal traditions, and passive-like constructions in analytic languages. Her publications include "Middle Class African Americans: Reactions and Attitudes Toward African American English" (forthcoming), and “An ay for an ah: Language
of Survival in African American Narrative Comedy,” American Speech (2007).

Elaine Richardson is Professor of Literacy Studies in the College of Education at Ohio State University. She has published several books including African American Literacies, (Routledge, 2003) and Hiphop Literacies (Routledge, 2006). The book she is currently writing is entitled PHD 2 PhD: Po Ho on Dope to Dr. E. She has also co-edited two volumes on African American rhetorical theory, Understanding African American Rhetoric: Classical Origins to Contemporary Innovations (Routledge, 2003) and African American Rhetoric(s): Interdisciplinary Perspectives (Southern Illinois UP, 2004), and one volume on Hiphop Feminism€ Home Girls Make Some Noise (Parker Publishing, 2007).

Tani Dianca Sanchez is a faculty member of Africana Studies at the University of Arizona where she teaches black women's literature and African American survey courses. Her doctorate in cultural studies focuses on media representations and the evolving impact of racialized representation across a variety of cultural productions. As a regular presenter in UA film and lecture series at the UA, Dr. Sanchez has researched and presented topics ranging from African American genealogy to quilting. Her manuscript “Neo-abolitionist, colorblind epistemologies and black politics” was published in the anthology The Persistence of Whiteness: Race and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema. She has written for the University of Arizona's magazine Report on Research, and is the editor of Traditions of Uplift: A History of the Arizona Association of Colored Women's Clubs and Meals and Memoir: Recipes and Remembrances of African American in Tucson, Arizona.

Arthur Spears is currently the President of the Society for Pidgin and Creole Linguistics. He is the founder and first editor of Transforming Anthropology , the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists. Additionally, he has served on the editorial boards of several publications, including American Speech, Transforming Anthropology , and the Journal of Pidgin and Creole Linguistics . His research interests include language contact/ pidgin and creole languages (French- and Iberian-lexifier creoles); sociolinguistics; anthropological linguistics; African American English; language, race, and ideology; language and education, controversial words and expressions. His publications include Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas, with Sinfree Makoni, Geneva Smitherman, Arnetha F. Ball, eds. ( Routledge, 2003); Race and Ideology: Language, Symbolism, and Popular Culture, (Wayne State U P, 1999); and The Structure and Status of Pidgins and Creoles, with Donald Winford, eds. (John Benjamins, 1997).

Denise Troutman is an Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, as well as for the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Culture at Michigan State University. Her research interests include developmental and first-year writing, language and society, discourse analysis, women and language, African American women's discourse patterns, and African American English. She has published in a variety of collections and journals, including Centering Ourselves: African American Feminist and Womanist Studies in Discourse (Hampton Press, 2001), Sociocultural and Historical Contexts of African American English (John Benjamins, 2001), and The Workings of Language: From Prescriptions to Perspectives (Praeger, 1999).

Alicia Beckford-Wassink is the Howard and Frances Nostrand Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington in Seattle where she is also Director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory. She is also a Visiting Research Fellow with the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston, Jamaica. Her research interests include Sociolinguistics (social network theory, phonological variation, language ideology, language attitudes), Acoustic phonetics (spectral and temporal characteristics of vowels), and Creole linguistics (Jamaican Creole phonetics and phonology). Her publications include “Language Ideology and the Transmission of Phonological Change,” with Judy Dyer, Journal of English Linguistics (2004), “Addressing Ideologies Around African American English,” with Anne Curzan, Journal of English Linguistics (2004), and “Theme and Variation in Jamaican Vowels,” Language Variation and Change (2001).

Jessica DeCuir-Gunby is an Assistant Professor of Educational Psychology in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at North Carolina State University. Her research and theoretical interests include race and racial identity development, Black education, critical race theory, mixed methods research, and emotions. Her publications include “Achievement Goals, Emotional Regulation During Testing, and Test Emotions: Analyzing Interrelationships and Evaluating the Construct Validity of the ERT Scale,” with P.A. Schutz and J. Benson, Anxiety, Stress, and Coping (in press); “Designing Mixed Methods Research in the Social Sciences: A Racial Identity Scale Development Example,” edited with J. Osborne, Best Practices in Quantitative Methods (in press); and “African American Educators' Perspectives on the Advanced Placement Opportunity Gap,” with J.D. Taliaferro, Urban Review (2007) .

Adrienne Dixson is Assistant Professor of African American & African Studies and Women's Studies at Ohio State University. Her research focuses on racial and gender identities in urban schooling contexts. Her most recent publications include "Tyranny of the Majority: Re-enfranchisement of African American Teacher Educators Teaching for Democracy" with Jeannine E. Dingus, International Studies in Qualitative Research Journal (2007); "In Search of Our Mother's Gardens: Black Women Teachers and Professional Socialization," with Jeannine E. Dingus, Teachers College Record (Spring 2008, available online, November 2007) as well as her co-edited book with Celia K. Rousseau Anderson Critical Race Theory in Education: All God's Children Got a Song (Routledge Falmer, 2006).

Shelome Gooden is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania. Her current research interests include Pittsburgh AAVE: Ethnicity, Local Identity, and Local Speech; the acoustic properties of segmentally identical reduplicated words in Jamaican Creole; acoustic correlates of stress in Jamaican Creole; and aspects of past time reference in Belizean Creole: lexical aspect, discourse and morphysyntactic considerations. Her publications include “Diversity in the Linguistics Classroom,” Diversity Across the Curriculum: A Guide for Faculty in Higher Education J. Branche, J. Mullennix and E.Cohn eds., (Anker Publications, 2007); and “Morphophonological Properties of Pitch Accents in Jamaican Creole Reduplication,” Synchronic and Diachronic Perspectives on Contact Languages. M. Huber & V. Velupillai eds. (John Benjamins, 2007).

Lisa Green is associate professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Massachusetts and the director of the Center for the Study of African American Language (College of Humanities and Fine Arts--UMass). She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on syntax, syntactic variation, socio-syntactic approaches, linguistics and education and English dialects. She is the author of African American English: A Linguistic Introduction (Cambridge University Press) and book chapters and journal articles on topics in syntax and dialects of English. Green's research on the development of linguistic patterns in the speech of three-, four- and five-year olds, which was supported by the National Science Foundation, will be reported in her book Language And The African American Child (to be published by Cambridge University Press).

John R. Rickford is Professor of Linguistics at Stanford University, where he has been a faculty member since 1980. He received his BA with highest honors in Sociolinguistics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1971, and his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1979. His interests include sociolinguistics, especially the relation between language and ethnicity; social class and style; language variation and change; pidgin and creole languages; African American Language; and the applications of linguistics to educational problems. He is the author of many scholarly articles and his books include Dimensions of a Creole Continuum (1987), Sociolinguistics and Pidgin-Creole Studies (ed., 1988), A Festival of Guyanese Words (ed., 1978), Variation in Language (co-ed. Keith Denning, Sharon Inkelas, and Faye McNair-Knox, 1987), and African American English: Structure, History, and Usage (with Salikoko Mufwene, Guy Bailey, and John Baugh, 1998), African American Vernacular English (1999), Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse (co-ed. Suzanne Romaine and Charlene J. Sato. 1999), Spoken Soul: The Story of Black English (with Russell Rickford, 2000), Style and Sociolinguistic Variation (co-ed. Penelope Eckert, 2001), and Language in the USA (co-ed. Edward Finegan, 2004).

Christine Mallinson is an assistant professor in the interdisciplinary Language, Literacy, and Culture Program and an affiliate assistant professor in the Gender and Women's Studies Program at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County . Her current projects investigate variation and change in African American English among residents of Washington, DC, and Baltimore, Maryland. She is also interested in language and discrimination, racetalk, and the interface between sociolinguistics and social theory, specifically as relates to the theory and measurement of social class in variationist sociolinguistics. Her publications include “The Linguistic Negotiation of Complex Racialized Identities by Black Appalachian Speakers” in Sustaining Linguistic Diversity: Endangered and Minority Languages and Language Varieties , eds. Kendall A. King et al (Georgetown UP, 2007), and “Communities of Practice in Sociolinguistic Description: Analyzing Language and Identity Practices Among Black Women in Appalachia”, with Becky Childs, Gender & Language 2007 .