P. Gabrielle Foreman is a literary historian and specialist on race and nineteenth-century reform movements. She is the author of dozens of articles and reviews, the editor or author of several books and has served on the editorial and consulting boards of some of the leading journals in American literature. Her most recent publications include Activist Sentiments: Reading Black Women in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming) and Harriet Wilson's Our Nig or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (Penguin Classics 2005) in which she and her co-editor "picked up one of the coldest trails in nineteenth-century African American studies" by uncovering the last forty years in the life of one of the most important early Black women writers.

For more than fifteen years, she has been active with community and educational groups as a scholar, speaker and organizer. She is co-founder of ASHAYE, Action for Social Change and Youth Empowerment which placed African American, American Pacific Islander and Latino youth on the Boards of Directors of California community groups that serve youth constituencies. She lives in Los Angeles where she is a Professor of English and American Studies at Occidental College.

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