Abena P. A. Busia is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Literatures 

in English, and Women’s and Gender Studies, at Rutgers, The State University 

of New Jersey, where she has taught since 1981. Born in Accra, Ghana, she spent 

the first years of her childhood at home, as well as in Holland and Mexico, before 

her family finally settled in Oxford, England, where she read for a BA in 

English Language and Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford, in 1976, and a DPhil 

in Social Anthropology (Race Relations) at St Antony's College in 1984.

The current Director of The Association for the Study of the Worldwide African
Diaspora, she lectures and publishes widely on the African Diaspora literature and

culture, and curriculum transformation for race and gender.

She is co-editor, with Stanlie James, of Theorizing Black Feminisms: The Visionary 
Pragmatism of Black Women, and of Beyond Survival: African Literature & 
the Search for New Life.She also co-edited the publication from the proceedings of the
1994 African Literature Association Conference, with Kofi Anyidoho and Anne Adams.
She co-directed, and co-edited with Tuzyline Jita Allan, and Florence Howe of the
Feminist Press the two decades long Women Writing Africa continent-wide publishing
project of cultural reconstruction whose four volumes were published between 2003
and 2009. She has published two volumes of poems, Testimonies of Exile published
by Africa World Press, Trenton NJ, in 1990, and Traces of a Life, published by
Ayebia Clarke Publishing Limited, Oxfordshire, in 2008. Her poetry has also been published
in various magazines and anthologies in West Africa, North America and Europe.