Bio: Born in the Projects in Watts a few years before the Riots, Alexis Brooks de Vita lived in Uganda under Idi Amin Dada and was sent to school in Switzerland to escape his coup, travelling through France, Italy, Hungary, and Russia while it was still the Soviet Union. She has two grown daughters and two young adult sons who have also traveled through Europe and to Uganda. Her degrees are in the Comparative Literature of women of African descent in English, French, Italian, and Spanish. She teaches African and African American Literature and Literary Theory and is the author of Mythatypes: Signatures and Signs of African/Diaspora and Black Goddesses and The 1855 Murder Case of Missouri versus Celia, an Enslaved Woman: An Exercise in Historical Imagination.