Vanessa K. Valdés is an independent writer, scholar, speaker, and curator. Her books include Let Spirit Speak! Cultural Journeys through the African Diaspora, Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas, Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, and Racialized Visions: Haiti and the Hispanic Caribbean, all published by SUNY Press. Earl E. Fitz is Professor of Portuguese, Spanish, and Comparative Literature at Vanderbilt University. He is the author of The Literatures of Spanish America and Brazil and Machado de Assis and Narrative Theory: Language, Imitation, Art, and Verisimilitude in the Last Six Novels, among many other books.b>