Harriet E. Wilson was an African-American novelist. She was the first African American to publish a novel in North America.

Our Nig: Sketches from the Life of a Free Black is an autobiographical novel by Harriet E. Wilson. First published in 1859, it was rediscovered in 1981 by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and was subsequently reissued with an introduction by Gates. Our Nig has since been republished in several other editions. It was long considered the first novel published by an African-American woman in North America, though that record is now contested by another manuscript found by Gates, The Bondwoman's Narrative, which may have been written a few years earlier.