Harryette Mullen is a poet and a professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she teaches creative writing and African American literature. Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, but spent most of her childhood in Fort Worth, Texas. After earning her BA from the University of Texas in Austin, she earned a PhD from the University of California at Santa Cruz, where she wrote her dissertation on slave narratives. Even when writing essays and fiction, though, poetry continued to be important to her. Her poetry has been hailed by critics as unique, powerful, and challenging.