Tess Chakkalakal is an assistant professor in the departments of Africana Studies and English at Bowdoin College. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from York University in Toronto, and her B.A. from the University of Toronto. Her essays on early African American literature have appeared in South Atlantic Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, and The Review of Black Political Economy, as well as in several edited volumes. She is currently completing a book on nineteenth-century African American literature entitled Novel Bondage: Slavery, Marriage, and Freedom in Nineteenth-Century America. She is co-editor of the Critical Edition of the Novels of Sutton E. Griggs (forthcoming from West Virginia University Press) and is co-editing a Collection of Critical Essays on the Life and Work of Sutton E. Griggs.