JEAN FAGAN YELLIN

Author of Harriet Jacobs: A Life (Basic Civitas Books 2004), Women and Sisters: The Anti-Slavery Feminists in American Culture (1990); and The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776-1863 (1972), Jean Fagan Yellin is best known for her editions of Harriet Jacobs's 1861 slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1987, 2000). In addition to writing numerous articles in journals and essays in collections, she is co-editor of The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Antislavery and Women's Political Culture (1994), and co-compiler of the bibliography The Pen Is Ours: A Listing of Writings by African-American Women to 1910, with Secondary Bibliography to the Present (1990), as well as the editor of editions of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1998), Margret Howth (1991), and Clotel (1969)

Among the research grants she has held are awards from the National Endowment for the Humanities; the American Association of University Women; the Smithsonian Institution; the W. E. B. DuBois Institute for Afro-American Research, Harvard University; The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library; and the National Humanities Intitute. She is currently completing work on the Harriet Jacobs Papers, which will result in the first scholarly edition of the papers of an African-American woman held in slavery.

An amateur ceramicist, Jean Fagan Yellin lives with her husband in Sarasota and New York.

>> Humanities Magazine article on the Harriet Jacobs Papers