Wallace Best is a professor of religion and African American studies at Princeton University. His teaching and research focus on the areas of African American religion, religion and literature, Pentecostalism, and Womanist theology.

He is the author of Passionately Human, No Less Divine: Religion and Culture in Black Chicago, 1915-1952, Princeton University Press. He is currently at work on two books: an anthology entitled Elder Lucy Smith: Documents from the Life of a Pentecostal Woman Preacher and an exploration of the religious thought of the poet Langston Hughes, entitled Langston’s Salvation: American Religion and the Bard of Harlem.