Marvin A. Lewis is Professor Emeritus of Spanish American and African Diaspora literatures in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures of the University of Missouri-Columbia. He is the founding Director of the Afro-Romance Institute for Languages and Literatures of the African Diaspora (1996-2005) at MU, Founder of the Afro-Latin/American Research Association (ALARA) and Editor of its publication (PALARA) (1996-2005). Lewis has published six books with the University of Missouri Press, which are: Afro-Hispanic Poetry, 1940-1980: From Slavery to Negritud in South American Verse, 1983; Treading the Ebony Path: Ideology and Violence in Contemporary Afro-Colombian Prose Fiction, 1987; Ethnicity and Identity in Contemporary Afro-Venezuelan Literature: a Culturalist Approach, 1992; Afro-Argentine Discourse: Another Dimension of the Black Diaspora, 1996, Translated by Gabriela Díaz Cortez, El discurso Afroargentino: otra dimensión de la diáspora negra, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina, 2011; An Introduction to the Literature of Equatorial Guinea; Between Colonialism and Dictatorship, 2007; and Equatorial Guinean Literature in its National and Transnational Contexts, 2017.
Lewis is also the author of The Peruvian Novels of Mario Vargas Llosa, 1983; Afro-Uruguayan Literature: Post-Colonial Persectives, 2003, translated by the author and Alicia Porrini, Cultura y literatura afrouruguaya: perspectivas post-coloniales, 2011; and Adalberto Ortiz: From Margin to Center, 2013.
Current projects include a book-length study: Nelson Estupiñán Bass: An Introduction to his writings (in press), translated by Gabriela Díaz Cortez and Valentina Goldraij, Nelson Estupiñán Bass: una introducción a sus escritos, Quito: Casa de la Cultura Ecuatoriana, 2017. A book-length study of Afrocolombian literature and the environment is underway. The project was supported by a Fulbright Grant in 2016 for research in the Colombian Chocó region.
Lewis lives in Columbia, MO.