Michael D. Hill is the inaugural director of the DeLaney Center as well as a Professor and Chair of Africana Studies at Washington and Lee University. He co-wrote Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man: A Reference Guide (2008), authored The Ethics of Swagger: Prizewinning African American Novels, 1977–1993 (2013), and co-edited Invisible Hawkeyes: African Americans at the University of Iowa During the Long Civil Rights Era (2016). He received the Nick Aaron Ford-Waters Edward Turpin Award and an honorable mention for the Benjamin F. Shambaugh Award. Currently, he is drafting Weathervanes of Democracy: Adolescence in African American Novels, 1937–2016.