Aldon Nielsen is a poet and critic born in Grand Island, Nebraska. He is the George and Barbara Kelly Professor of American Literature in the Pennsylvania State University ‘s Department of English. Educated in Washington, D.C. at Federal City College and George Washington University, Nielsen has taught at Howard University, San Jose State University, the University of California, Los Angeles, and Loyola Marymount University. He has published five collections of poetry, Mixage (2006), Vext (1998), Stepping Razor (1996), Evacuation Routes (1992), and Heat Strings (1985). He was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for poetry, and has received two Gertrude Stein Awards for innovative poetry. His first volume of literary criticism, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (1988), won the SAMLA Studies Prize, a Myers Citation and the Kayden Award for best book in the humanities. Subsequent works of scholarship include Writing between the Lines: Race and Intertextuality (1994), C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction (1997), Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism (1997), and Integral Music: Languages of African American Innovation (2004). Most recently Nielson co-edited, with Lauri Ramey, Every Goodbye Ain’ t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African American Artists (2006).