Vincent Carretta is the author of Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-Made Man. His other books include scholarly editions of the works of Equiano and of Equiano’s contemporaries Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Phillis Wheatley. Caretta is a professor of English at the University of Maryland and a senior fellow at Harvard University’s W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research.