Robert Dale Parker is a professor of English and American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He also taught at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, from 1982-84. An award-winning teacher, Parker has also written books on a wide range of topics in American literature and American Indian literature.

In recent years he has particularly researched early American Indian writing, trying to change the general lack of awareness of the long literary tradition among American Indians. As part of that research, he read the writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, an early nineteenth-century Ojibwe and Irish-American writer from what is now the state of Michigan who is the first-known American Indian literary writer. Once he saw a few of her manuscripts, he suspected that if he looked, he might find more, and then once he found more, he got hooked and kept looking for more and, eventually, finding more. The Sound the Stars Make Rushing Through the Sky: The Writings of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft includes a complete edition of Schoolcraft's writings and a cultural history and biography.