Michele Valerie Ronnick is Associate Professor in the Department of Classics, Greek and Latin at Wayne State University. A Latinist by training with a book on Cicero's Stoic Paradoxes, she has published widely in journals here and abroad and has won a number of professional awards for excellence in scholarship, teaching and service on regional and national levels. Ronnick's special interest in the Classical Tradition led her to open up a newsubfield of reception studies, Classica Africana, a.k.a. black classicism, which examines the influence of classics upon the creative and professional lives of people of African descent. She is the editor of a criticaledition of The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough.

Ronnick's deeply researched volume will make Scarborough's writings accessible to a broad audience of classical scholars and American historians.