Abena Busia was born in Accra, Ghana (1953). She spent the first years of her childhood at home as well as in Holland and Mexico, before her family settled in Oxford, England. She has been an external tutor at Ruskin College, Oxford, a visiting lecturer in the Department of Afro-American Studies at Yale University and has held post-doctoral fellowships at Bryn Mawr College and the Center for Afro-American Studies, University of California at Los Angeles. She is now Associate Professor of English at Rutgers State University, where she has taught since 1981.