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Literature

Linda M. Carter
Genevieve Slomski

• African American Literature of Colonial America

• African American Literature during the Antebellum Period

• African American Literature from Reconstruction to the Harlem Renaissance

• The Harlem Renaissance

• African American Literature of the Mid-Twentieth Century

• The Black Arts Movement

• African American Literature of the Late Twentieth Century and Early Twenty-First Century

• African American Authors and Literary Critics

• Award Winners

African American literature in the United States reached an artistic pinnacle in the period between World War I and World War II with the Harlem Renaissance. Since then, African American writing has embraced themes that range from the highly charged and sociopolitical to private and introspective. The Black Arts movement of the 1960s and 1970s brought acclaim and prominence to many African American writers, and fostered the growth of African American studies at numerous universities around the country. In the 1980s and 1990s, African American writers were working in every genre—from scriptwriting to poetry—as they signed more contracts with major publishing companies, and their works consistently appeared on bestseller lists. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, African American literature maintained the high level of visibility established in the 1980s and 1990s. Black writers continued to explore a diversity of genres, as well as themes, and to create critically acclaimed works.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE OF COLONIAL AMERICA

The African American literary tradition began in 1746 when Lucy Terry, at age 16, created Bars Fight and was sustained during the colonial era by individuals such as Jupiter Hammon, Phillis Wheatley, Briton Hammon, James Gronniosaw, and Olaudah Equiano. Although Terry’s poem was composed in 1746, it was preserved in song only until its publication in 1855. Thus, Jupiter Hammon’s An Evening Thought, Salvation, by Christ, with Penitential Cries, published as a broadside in 1760, was the first poem published by an African American. Thirteen years later, Phillis Wheatley became the first African American—and the second woman—to publish a book in the colonies. Published in 1773, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England made a tremendous impact on white colonial America, since many felt that African Americans were not capable of the depth of feeling required to write poetry. Soon after its publication, Wheatley gained such international recognition that she was granted her freedom.

While Terry, Hammon, and Wheatley composed poetry, Briton Hammon, Gronniosaw, and Equiano created autobiographies. In 1760 The Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon, a Negro Man was published. Hammon’s Narrative only contains 14 pages; however, it is considered the first African American autobiography. A more developed autobiography, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable

Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw was printed in 1770 and reprinted in later editions. Gronniosaw is mentioned in Equiano’s two-volume work, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself (1789). Gronniosaw and Equiano’s autobiographies provided a dual perspective that subsequent slave narratives lacked: life in Africa and life in America. Equiano’s autobiography became a bestseller within his lifetime, with nine English editions and one American edition including translations in Dutch, German, and Russian. Equiano died in 1797, yet his autobiography influenced many nineteenth century black autobiographers.

Therefore, these African Americans authors clearly demonstrated that that they could eloquently express themselves in English—a second language for most blacks during the colonial era—and represent themselves effectively in a variety of literary genres.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE DURING THE ANTEBELLUM PERIOD

Perhaps the greatest satisfaction for African American writers during the period prior to the Civil War was having the freedom to write. Actually, knowing how to read and write was a tremendous accomplishment for many African Americans. This was due to the fact that only sporadic attempts at systematic instruction of Africans in colonial America had been made, and stringent laws were later passed in the nineteenth century that prohibited whites from teaching African Americans to read and write.

THE SLAVE NARRATIVES

Slave narratives are literary milestones. Briton Hammon, James Gronnisaw, and Olaudah Equiano’s eighteenth-century autobiographies, along with their nineteenth-century counterparts, are the progenitors of full-length African American prose. These first-person narratives represented more than their individual authors; they provided a literary voice for the silent, enslaved masses that never had opportunities to document their life stories. In doing so, the autobiographers utilized the language of their captors as a method of rebellion.

During the nineteenth century, slave narratives established themes and structural considerations that had been previously overlooked. Noted literary critic Frances Smith Foster, in Witnessing Slavery: The Development of the Ante-Bellum Slave Narrative (1979), has identified four chronological phases prevalent in slave narratives: the loss of freedom, cognizance of options to slavery and a determination to gain freedom, escape, and freedom realized. Although many readers may consider the narratives by such persons as Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, or Harriet Jacobs more political than artistic, the ability to adapt and utilize language in a manner that showed the glaring inconsistencies and inhumanity of slavery must be recognized as an accomplishment of letters. The full extent of these writers’ revolutionary thoughts was channeled through these traditional subjects of the Bible and neoclassicism. However, the restructuring and inclusion of the African American perspective created a viable means of resistance and expression.

The three most prominent authors of slave narratives were Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, and Harriet Jacobs. Douglass wrote three autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845), which is considered the preeminent slave narrative; My Bondage and My Freedom (1855); and The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881). Douglass’s fellow abolitionist William Wells Brown also authored three autobiographies: Narrative of William Wells Brown, A Fugitive Slave (1847), his most popular autobiography; Three Years in Europe: Or Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852); and My Southern Home (1880).

Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is an important work in that it is the most comprehensive slave narrative by a woman. Douglass, Brown, and Jacobs’s autobiographies are currently in print, and they, along with other slave narratives, are available in various collections such as Yusef Taylor’s two-volume I Was Born a Slave: An Anthology of Classic Slave Narratives (1999) and The Library of America’s Slave Narratives (2000). The nineteenth-century slave narratives continued the tradition of black self-definition and self-assertion that was established by the eighteenth-century slave narratives. The slave narratives of both centuries served as a preface and a foundation for subsequent expression through fiction, poetry, autobiography, essays, and other genres.

NOVELS AND OTHER GENRES

During the antebellum period, the majority of published African American works were slave narratives; nevertheless, African Americans made significant contributions to other literary genres. Antebellum African American writers, following in the footsteps of their colonial predecessors, continued to create poetry. George Moses Horton, for example, published three volumes of verse: The Hope of Liberty (1829); The Poetical Works of George M. Horton, The Colored Bard of North Carolina (1845); and Naked Genius (1865).

Poetry and slave narratives were genres that African Americans began writing during the eighteenth century. In the nineteenth century, African Americans demonstrated their ability to create fiction. Victor Sejour’s short story The Mulatto (1837) is the earliest extant work of African American fiction. In 1859, Frances E. W. Harper’s The Two Offers, the earliest known short story by an African American woman, was published.

The first African American novels were published during the antebellum period. The most well-known are William Wells Brown’s Clotel, Or, the President’s Daughter (1853), the first African American novel; Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857); Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story White House, North, Showing That Slavery’s Shadows Fall Even There (1859), the first published novel by an African American woman; and Martin Delany’s Blake, or, the Huts of America (1859). In 2002, Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative was published. Crafts’s handwritten manuscript, dating from the 1850s, was recovered by Henry Louis Gates Jr., and authenticated in 2001. Crafts’s work appears to be the first novel written by a female fugitive slave, and it may be the first novel by an African American woman.

The first African American drama, The Escape, or, a Leap for Freedom, was published in 1858. Its author is William Wells Brown, the same individual who wrote one of the most influential slave narratives and the first African American novel. He is considered the first African American author of belles lettres.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE FROM RECONSTRUCTION TO THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

With the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the era of Reconstruction, African American writers were eager to address subjects of personal and individual freedom. However, prevalent attitudes forced black writers to continue to address issues of “the master mentality” and “plantation politics.” Few writers could support themselves by their writing, and many went unknown.

As the United States moved into the close of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth century, other African American writers, such as Frances E.W. Harper, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Waddell Chesnutt, found an audience that appreciated their works. Among their works published during this period are Harper’s novel Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted (1892); Dunbar’s volume of verse, Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896), which was his third of 11 volumes; Hopkins’s novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900); and Chesnutt’s short stories, The Conjure Woman (1899), and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899), as well as his three novels: The House Behind the Cedars (1900), The Marrow of Tradition (1901), and The Colonel’s Dream (1905). The most widely known work of this period, Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery (1901), was the bestselling slave narrative of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.

White society, however, still controlled much of publishing in America; African American work was often filtered and distorted through this lens. As a result, much of the work published by African Americans attempted to prove that they could fit into America’s middle class society. In fact, much of the literature of this era portrayed African Americans as being happy with their assigned lot. Yet some writers—Harper, Dunbar, Hopkins, and Chesnutt, for example—tried to break the chains of this imposed expression. They presented a view of African American life as it really was, not as white America wanted it to be.

The accomplishments of African American writers during the time prior to the Harlem Renaissance attest to both the use of literary forms and the purpose in finding their own voices. Although themes were often muted and subjected to continuous scrutiny, the use of imagery, language, and a new perspective opened the way for African American writers to focus more on the wealth of their culture and the African American experience in a truthful and honest fashion.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE

The Harlem Renaissance was the era of prolific African American creativity in literature, art, and music. Resistant to the easy categorization of a timeline, the Harlem Renaissance began around the onset of World War I in 1914 and extended into the early 1930s. It began with the movement of African American artists and writers into Harlem from practically every state in the country.

By the 1920s, Harlem was the largest community of black individuals in the world, encompassing Africans, people from the West Indies, the Caribbean, and the Americas. This community, similar to many urban communities in the North, saw the collective energies of persons joining together to celebrate the artistic talents of African Americans. While Harlem served as the hub of artistic activity, Washington, D.C. was also a place where many artists congregated to explore the new perspectives and ideas of the time. The largest group of women who were participants in the Harlem Renaissance found their literary identities not so much in Harlem, but in Washington in the company of host poet Georgia Douglas Johnson and other artists.

As African American journals such as W.E.B. Du Bois’s Crisis and Opportunity, edited by Charles S. Johnson, began to flourish, it became possible for African American writers to publish in a style that suited their tastes. Du Bois and Johnson were among the older, established authors, critics, and editors who encouraged younger writers. Jessie Redmon Fauset, who was an author of four novels and editor of Crisis magazine, did much to support the work of younger authors as well as women writers. In fact, Langston Hughes and others contend that the Renaissance came about because of the nurturing of older writers including Fauset and Alain Locke, a Howard University professor and literary critic. Also, African American writers discovered that some white patrons in the publishing field were, in fact, interested in promoting their works, and as a result, books by black authors were published with an unprecedented frequency.

In addition to Du Bois and Fauset, important writers of this era include Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Wallace Thurman, Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Nella Larsen, Eric Walrond, Rudolph Fisher, Jean Toomer, and Arna Bontemps. Among the most significant works of the era are Locke’s The New Negro (1925), an anthology of Harlem Renaissance works; Thurman’s Infants of the Spring (1932), a novel that satirizes the Harlem Renaissance; and Hughes’s The Big Sea (1940), his first autobiography that provides the best account of the Harlem Renaissance by one of its participants. Although free expression was essential to artists of the Harlem Renaissance, stereotypes that permeated the American culture made their writings appear rebellious. The conscious agenda of these mostly young, African American artists concerned the definition and celebration of African American art and culture and a desire to change the preconceived and erroneous notions most Americans had of African American life. Such views are eloquently expressed best in Hughes’s essay “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926). Hughes’s essay, which was a manifesto for his contemporaries and has served as inspiration for subsequent generations of African Americans, ends with his bold declaration:

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn’t matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, strong as we know how, and we stand on top of the mountain, free within ourselves.

The Harlem Renaissance shifted away from the moralizing work that had been characteristic of much of post-Reconstruction writing that decried racism. W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke realized that, as did many of the emerging young writers, literary efforts that catered to changing the conscience of the United States were no longer useful nor should such efforts be a primary consideration for artists. These writers felt communicating the African American experience through every facet of artistic mediums would, of itself, expound upon ills of a racist world. Issues then could be expressed through the lives of working-class and middle-class characters as the text sought to paint a realistic picture.

In this time of discovery for African Americans of the view from within, many also saw the changing relationships between blacks and whites. Literature reintroduced white America to a people who needed, wanted, and would eventually demand full participation in the society for which they had lived, labored, and died. This perspective would end the goal of convincing white America of African American entitlement and, instead, focus on self-education and exploration of the quality of the African American experience. It paved the way for power through art to inspire the masses and the writers of the 1960s.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE MID-TWENTIETH CENTURY

As the Great Depression of the 1930s deepened, the Harlem Renaissance slowly faded. Richard Wright’s publication in 1940 of Native Son marked the beginning of a transition period in African American literature that would last until 1955. Writers during this time bridged the richly creative period of the Renaissance with the more intense creativity and sociopolitical activity that was to define the work produced during the civil rights movement.

With the publication of his classic novel Native Son, Wright maintained that the era of the Harlem Renaissance—with its motto of “art for art’s sake”—must end and be replaced with works directly intended to stop racism. He also believed that African Americans were an essential part of American society. These tenets became the foundation for the ideology of the civil rights movement.

During this time, other African American writers, notably poets, were taking a different road in their quest to be heard. Such poets as Gwendolyn Brooks, Melvin B. Tolson, Margaret Walker, and Robert Hayden employed classical and mythical themes. Brooks won a Pulitzer Prize in 1950 for her book Annie Allen (1949) and was the first African American to receive the award. These poets used a blend of extreme eclecticism with realistic, African American issues. The blend was successful, as their writing was met with acceptance in the university community.

Ann Petry’s novel The Street (1946); Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), arguably one of the best novels published in the United States during the twentieth century; James Baldwin’s novel Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), as well as his essays such as Notes of a Native Son (1955), Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (1961), and The Fire Next Time (1963), were other books that brought serious African American issues to mainstream culture. In addition, many African American works were gaining acceptance with the mainstream literary establishment.

In 1959, on the “eve” of the Black Arts movement, Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun opened in New York. Hansberry was the first African American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, and the first African American to win the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Hansberry received inspiration for the drama’s title from lines in a Langston Hughes poem, Dream Deferred. Her play centers around the Younger family’s desire to move from Chicago’s South Side to a white neighborhood. Thus, art imitated reality as A Raisin in the Sun mirrored the many efforts to integrate neighborhoods across America during the 1950s.

THE BLACK ARTS MOVEMENT

The Black Arts movement, sometimes called the Black Aesthetics movement, was the first major African American artistic movement since the Harlem Renaissance. Beginning in the early 1960s and lasting through the mid-1970s, this movement was fueled by the anger of Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Ann Petry, and other notable African American writers.

The artistic movement flourished alongside the civil rights marches and the call for the independence of the African American community. As phrases such as “black is beautiful” were popularized, African American writers of the Black Arts movement consciously set out to define what it meant to be a black writer in a white culture. While writers of the Harlem Renaissance seemed to investigate their identity within, writers of the Black Arts movement desired to define themselves and their era before being defined by others.

For the most part, participants in the Black Arts movement were supportive of separatist politics and a black nationalist ideology. Larry Neal wrote in an essay “The Black Arts Movement” (1968) that the movement was the “aesthetic and spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Rebelling against the mainstream society by being essentially anti-white, anti-American, and anti-middle class, these artists moved from the Renaissance view of art for art’s sake into a philosophy of art for politics’ sake.

The Black Arts movement attempted to produce works of art that would be meaningful to the African American masses. Towards this end, popular African American music of the day, including John Coltrane’s jazz and James Brown’s soul, as well as street talk, were some of the inspirational forces for the movement. In fact, much of the language used in these works was aggressive, profane, and shocking—this was often a conscious attempt to show the vitality and power of African American activists. These writers tended to be revolutionaries, supporting both radical and peaceful protests for change as promoted by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. In addition, they believed that artists were required to do more than create: artists also had to be political activists in order to achieve nationalist goals.

Leading writers in this movement included Amiri Baraka (Leroi Jones), whose poetry and plays were as well known as his political prowess, and Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), a poet and essayist who sold more than 100,000 copies of his books without a national distributor. On the other hand, Ishmael Reed—an early organizer of the Black Arts movement—later dissented with some of the movement’s doctrines and became inspired more by the black magic and spiritual practices of the West Indies (in what he called the “HooDoo Aesthetic”). Other organizers and essayists include Larry Neal, Ethridge Knight, Addison Gale Jr., and Maulana Karenga.

Nikki Giovanni was one of the first poets of the Black Arts movement to receive recognition. In her works, she advocated militant replies to white oppression and demonstrated through her performances that music is an inextricable part of the African American tradition in all aspects of life. Poet Sonia Sanchez was another leading voice of the movement. She managed to combine feminism with her commitment to nurturing children and men in the fight for black nationalism. Sanchez was a member of the Nation of Islam from 1972 to 1975, and through her association with the Black Arts movement, she managed to instill stronger support for the role of women in that religion.

Two major Black Arts presses were run by poets: Dudley Randall’s Broadside Press in Detroit and Haki Madhubuti’s Third World Press in Chicago. From 1961 to 1976, the most important African American magazine was Negro Digest (renamed Black World in 1970); its editor, Hoyt Fuller, published the works of the Black Arts poets and prose writers. Landmark publications of the movement include Black Fire (1968), an anthology of Black Arts writing edited by Amiri Baraka and Larry Neal; The New Black Poetry (1969), edited by Clarence Major; The Black Woman (1970), the first major African American feminist anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara; The Black Poets (1971), edited by Dudley Randall; and Understanding the New Black Poetry (1972), an anthology edited by Stephen Henderson.

AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE OF THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY AND EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Before the Black Arts movement ended in the mid-1970s, Marvin Gaye’s album What’s Going On (1971) was released. On the album’s title track, Gaye sings about the social problems of the late 1960s and early 1970s: the Vietnam War, protest demonstrations, and subsequent police brutality. The title of his classic album was not only a popular greeting but also testimony to the African American literary tradition. Since the end of the Black Arts movement, African Americans have written about “what’s going on” in greater numbers and to greater recognition than at any other time in literary history.

Important developments in African American literature during the last three decades of the twentieth century include the overwhelming success of many African American women writers, as well as a growth in the number of authors who have found that they can straddle more than one genre. The works of black writers appear more frequently as bestsellers, and at times, works of several African American authors appear concurrently on the lists. African American writing has become more legitimized in the United States, and African American studies departments have emerged in many universities around the country.

One of the first books of the contemporary renaissance of African American literature was Alex Haley’s Roots (1976). It was perhaps one of the greatest African American writing coups of the late twentieth century. With Haley’s book, as well as the highly popular television miniseries that followed, many black Americans have been encouraged to discover their own African roots. Since then, other books that explore the history of African Americans in the American West, the South, and the North have been published and eagerly received by African Americans.

As a result of the large number of African American literary works that have been published since the 1980s, a multitude of themes are present. Many African American writers have shifted their attention away from writing about the lack of equality between blacks and whites and toward themes of self-reflection, self-definition, and healing. Numerous African American women write in response to the Black Arts movement, protesting the role that they feel women played in the male-oriented black nationalist movement.

Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and her other works have been resurrected and used as inspiration. The women’s liberation movement also supports these women by allowing their works to reach a wider audience. In this way, the somewhat female-repressive politics of the Black Arts movement has provoked women writers to express their own unique voices. Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Terry McMillan, and Gloria Naylor are examples of successful women novelists who have become prominent figures in the publishing world. Autobiographer and poet Maya Angelou is another major literary figure.

Since the 1980s, African American women writers have been at the leading edge of the publishing industry—in quality as well as quantity of work. In addition to Walker, Jones, Morrison, McMillan, and Naylor, other prominent women working primarily as novelists include Edwidge Danticat, Gwendolyn Parker, Jamaica Kincaid, Lucinda Roy, Marita Golden, Bernice McFadden, Toni Cade Bambara, Diane McKinney-Whetstone, Helen Lee, Yolanda Joe, Dawn Turner Trice, Pearl Cleage, and Barbara Chase-Riboud. While African American male writers are outnumbered by black women writers, among the contemporary African American male novelists are Ernest Gaines, Ishmael Reed, Walter Mosley, John Edgar Wideman, Albert French, E. Lynn Harris, Colson White-head, Darryl Pinckney, Brian Keith Jackson, Trey Ellis, Brent Wade, and Clarence Major. African American novelists often confront issues of identity, offering interpretations of womanhood and manhood. Challenged by W.E.B. Du Bois’s statement about dual identity as an American and as a black person, they collectively provide panoramic insight into African American life.

The decade of the 1990s as well as the first decade of the twenty-first century benefited from a broad spectrum of African American works that explored “breath of life” experiences. Themes centered on slavery are prevalent in the works of writers who focus on the African American past. Relationships are of thematic interest to many modern day African American writers. Other important themes in contemporary African American literature relate to family and coming-of-age issues. A number of the coming-of-age novels by African Americans portray their protagonists maturing during the civil rights era.

Barriers have been dismantled in various genres. Rivaling their white contemporaries, Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany create works of science fiction; Tananarive Due crafts supernatural novels; Walter Mosley, Barbara Neely, Valerie Wilson Wesley, and Eleanor Taylor Bland write detective fiction; and August Wilson and Susan-Lori Parks take their plays to Broadway. Clearly, variety exists in contemporary African American novels. Novels of folk history, such as Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days (2001), and novels of the urban experience, such as Richard Wright’s posthumous novella, Rite of Passage (1994), are equally well received. Many artists find that they can straddle more than one genre—Walter Mosley, Alice Walker, Gayl Jones, J. California Cooper, and Andrea Lee are good examples.

With the exception of the novel, the most prolific form of African American writing during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is autobiography. Memoirs and autobiographies have become a popular mode of expression, especially for non-professional writers, entertainers, athletes, educators, ministers, civil rights leaders, politicians, physicians, attorneys, motivational speakers, and relatives of celebrities have written their life stories.

A memoir worthy of distinction is Arthur Ashe’s Days of Grace (1993), a work he co-authored with professor and literary critic Arnold Rampersad. In it, the tennis legend reveals that living with AIDS was not his life’s greatest burden; living as a black person in America was.

One of the most popular autobiographies at the end of the twentieth century was Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years (1993), by Sarah (Sadie) L. Delany and A. Elizabeth (Bessie) Delany (with Amy Hill Hearth). Their autobiography was published when Sadie, a former educator, was 104 years old, and Bessie, a former dentist and civil rights activist, was 102. Philanthropist, entrepreneur, and foundation executive Camille Cosby acquired the stage, film, and television rights to the autobiography. Consequently, Having Our Say opened on Broadway in 1995, and was later transformed into a made-for-television film. During the summer of 2002, Having Our Say was recommended reading as the District of Columbia began a program designed to encourage individuals to read.

“Amateur” writers are not the only individuals publishing their memoirs, however. Maya Angelou’s first autobiography, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1970), is greatly responsible for the revitalization of African American autobiography. Angelou has written five additional autobiographies, including A Song Flung Up to Heaven (2002). In 1977, 17 years after Richard Wright’s death, his second autobiography, American Hunger, was published. Its pages are comprised of the section that Wright’s publisher deleted from Black Boy (1945).

Poetry, the first genre that African Americans produced, remains a popular vehicle for black expression. A number of poets who began publishing their works in the 1960s, such as Mari Evans, Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, Haki Madhubuti, and Nikki Giovanni, along with poets who were first published in the 1970s, such as Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, Ai, Toi Derricotte, and Yusef Komunyakaa, have continued to publish in the 1990s and beyond. Joining them are poets who began publishing in the 1980s—Rita Dove and Cornelius Eady—as well as poets who began publishing in the 1990s, including Kevin Powell, Elizabeth Alexander, and Kevin Young.

Important anthologies that include verse or collections of poetry published since the 1990s include On the Verge: Emerging Poets and Artists (1993), edited by Thomas Sayers Ellis and Joseph Lease; The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry (1999), edited by Joanne Gabbin; and Words With Wings: A Treasury of African-American Poetry and Art (2000), edited by Belinda Rochelle. In 1994, James Madison University hosted the Furious Flower Conference, dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks. The conference featured three generations of poets, and was acknowledged as the “largest gathering of poets and critics” in more than two decades. A second Furious Flower Conference was held in Harrisburg, Virginia, in 2004, with more than 60 distinguished poets and scholars in attendance.

Whether writing in traditional styles such as the sonnet or being influenced by rap or hip-hop, African American creators of verse tackle the same issues as their prose counterparts: identity, racism, sexism, classism, relationships, politics, and urban life. Since the 1980s, poetry has become more popular and more accessible in the United States. Bookstores, universities, and literary groups continue to host established poets who read their verse before audiences. In addition, bookstores and cafés hold poetry slams and open mike nights where amateur poets can present their works. There are a variety of Internet sites that encourage novices to submit their verse.

African American writers and their works continue to be heralded on the national and international levels. Multiple National Book Award winners have been African Americans since the 1980s, including Alice Walker, Charles Johnson, Ai, and Lucille Clifton. Pulitzer Prizes have been awarded to Alex Haley, August Wilson, and Rita Dove, among others. And two African American women writers recorded landmark achievements in 1993: Rita Dove was named U.S. poet laureate and Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

With the arrival of the twenty-first century, African American writers continue to look into their own world for answers rather than letting others define their past, present, or future. Contemporary black authors are the beneficiaries of the vast legacy established by writers of the colonial period, the antebellum period, reconstruction era, Harlem Renaissance, the mid-twentieth century, and the Black Arts movement. Twenty-first century writers, empowered by their talents and their literary ancestors, are expanding and enhancing the African American literary tradition.

AFRICAN AMERICAN AUTHORS AND LITERARY CRITICS

(To locate biographical profiles more readily, please consult the index at the back of the book.)

RAYMOND ANDREWS (1934–1991) Novelist

Born in 1934 in Madison, Georgia, Raymond Andrews left his sharecropper home for Atlanta at 15 years of age. Once establishing himself, he attended high school at night and went on to the U.S. Air Force (1952–1956) and attended Michigan State University before moving to New York City. While working in New York in a variety of jobs—airline reservations clerk, hamburger cook, photo librarian, proofreader, inventory taker, mail room clerk, messenger, air courier dispatcher, and bookkeeper—he also perfected his literary skills.

Andrews’ Muskhogean County trilogy, which describes the life of African Americans in the deep South from World War I to the beginnings of the civil rights’ era in the 1960s, includes three novels. The first novel, Appalachee Red (1978), set in the African American neighborhood of a northern Georgia town called Appalachee, was widely acclaimed. In the opinion of the reviewer for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, his work marked the literary debut of a significant modern American novelist comparable in stature to a Richard Wright or James Baldwin. The following year, Raymond Andrews was the first recipient of the annual James Baldwin Prize presented by Dial Press at a ceremony attended by Baldwin.

Andrews’s second work, Rosiebelle Lee Wildcat Tennessee: A Novel (1980), chronicled the 40-year reign—which began in 1906—of the spiritual and temporal leader of the African American community of Appalachee. Baby Sweets (1983), Andrews’s third novel, is named after the brothel operated by the eccentric son of Appalachee’s leading citizen. The brothel provides African American prostitutes to the town’s white population. The novel was published by Dial Press and illustrated by Andrew’s brother, Benny, who illustrated all of Andrew’s novels. This novel examines how the intermingling of the races affects an entire community, both black and white.

On November 25, 1991, Andrews died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in Athens, Georgia.

MAYA ANGELOU (1928– ) Novelist, Poet, Actress

Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Johnson on April 4, 1928, is a writer, journalist, poet, actress, singer, dancer, playwright, director, and producer. Angelou spent her formative years shuttling between her native St. Louis, a tiny, totally segregated town in Arkansas, and San Francisco, where she realized her ambition of becoming that city’s first African American streetcar conductor. But her true mark came later in life as her words became a symbol of hope that touched the soul of the people of the United States. Perhaps the ultimate recognition of her talent came when President-elect Bill Clinton asked the poet to compose and recite an inaugural poem for his swearing-in ceremony in 1993. Before reaching that point, however, Angelou experienced a great variety of life’s offerings, as inspired by her mother, grandmother, and other female role models in her life.

During the 1950s, Angelou studied dance with Pearl Primus in New York City, and later appeared as a nightclub singer there, as well as in San Francisco and Hawaii. She toured with the U.S. State Department’s production of Porgy and Bess in the mid-1950s. She began the following decade in the position of northern coordinator of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Angelou went abroad working as an editor for The Arab Observer, an English-language weekly published in Cairo. While living in Accra, Ghana, under the black nationalist regime of Kwame Nkrumah, she taught music, drama, and wrote for the Ghanian Times. Angelou later went to Sweden to study cinematography.

Angelou became a national celebrity in 1970 with the publication of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first volume of her autobiography, which detailed her encounters with Southern racism and a pre-pubescent rape by her mother’s lover. The work was nominated for that year’s National Book Award. Four additional volumes of Angelou’s autobiography were published: Gather Together in My Name (1974); Singin’ and Swingin’ and Gettin’ Merry Like Christmas (1976); The Heart of a Woman (1981); and A Song Flung Up To Heaven (2002).

Angelou’s published works also include: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ’fore I Die: The Poetry of Maya Angelou (1971); Oh Pray My Wings Are Gonna Fit Me Well (1975); And Still I Rise (1978); Shaker Why Don’t You Sing? (1983); All God’s Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986); and Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now (1993). In addition, Angelou’s works include: Mrs. Flowers: A Moment of Friendship; Now Sheba Sings the Song; and Phenomenal Woman: Four Poems Celebrating Women.

Not limited to writing, Angelou dabbled both in front of and behind the camera. In 1977, she was nominated for an Emmy award for her portrayal of Nyo Boto in the television adaptation of Alex Haley’s bestselling novel Roots. She also starred in the 1993 made-for-television movie There Are No Children Here, which co-starred Oprah Winfrey. That same year, Angelou wrote poetry for John Singleton’s Poetic Justice and played a small role in the film. The following year, Angelou appeared in a television commercial, reading a version of her poem “Still I Rise” for the United Negro College Fund’s Fiftieth Anniversary. She co-starred with Winona Ryder, Anne Bancroft, and Ellen Burstyn in How to Make an American Quilt (1995). Also active behind the scenes, she became the first African American woman to have a movie produced with Georgia, Georgia (1972), based on one of her books; and directed the films All Day Long in 1974 and Down in the Delta in 1998. In 2004, she published Hallelujah! The Welcome Table: A Lifetime of Memories with Recipes.

The 1990s held many highlights for the sought-after poet, who remained as active as she had been earlier in her career. On January 20, 1993, Angelou read her newly-created “On the Pulse of Morning” during the inauguration of President Bill Clinton. This event occurred just a few days after her play And Still I Rise was performed in Washington, D.C. In 1994, Angelou narrated a World Choir ’94 concert held at the Georgia Dome, where the festival featured 10,000 singers from ten different countries. She also gave a reading at the National Black Arts Festival that year. In 1995, Angelou delivered “A Brave and Startling Truth” at a United Nation’s fiftieth anniversary ceremony held in San Francisco, read Sterling Brown’s “Strong Men” at the inauguration of Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry, and was a keynote speaker, along with First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, at the 25th anniversary of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.

Angelou has been the recipient of many honorary degrees and awards that include a Golden Eagle Award for the 1977 documentary Afro-American in the Arts, a Matrix Award from Women in Communications, Inc. in 1983, a North Carolina award in literature in 1987, a “best-mannered” citation from the National League of Junior Cotillions in 1993, a Medal of Distinction from the University of Hawaii’s Board of Regents in 1994, and a Spingarn Medal from the NAACP that year. In 1981, Wake Forest University gave Angelou a lifetime appointment as Reynolds Professor of American Studies. In 2000, Angelou was awarded the national medal of art by President Bill Clinton. A year later, she was honored with the Aaron Davis Hall Harlem Renaissance Award. In 2006, she received the Mother Teresa Award for her devotion and service to humanity.

HOUSTON A. BAKER JR. (1943– ) Writer, Literary Critic, Scholar, Educator

Houston A. Baker was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on March 22, 1943. In spite of the racist attitudes that permeated his environment, he went on to see himself as more than a victim. He attended Howard University and received a bachelor’s degree in English and his master’s and doctoral degrees from the University of California at Los Angeles. Out of his youthful experiences, he became an advocate for the Black Power movement, which advocated black nationalism in the period of the late 1960s and 1970s.

As a young scholar, Baker shifted his critical perspective toward an African American aesthetic in African American literature. In other words, he considered art an instrument of cultural expression in the liberation of black people—an instrument that should be recognized in the study of African American works.

As editor of the book Black Literature in America (1971), an anthology of African American writers, he began to produce books that gave voice to artistic and literary experiences found in the study of African American literature. Among others, his books include: Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Native Son (1972); A Many-Colored Coat of Dreams: The Poetry of Countee Cullen (1974); No Matter Where You Travel, You Still Be Black (1979); The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism (1980); Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave /emphasis> (1982); Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984); Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (1987); Afro-American Poetics: Revision of Harlem and the Black Aesthetic (1988); Black Feminist Criticism and Critical Theory (1988); Afro-American Literary Study in the 1990’s (1989); Black Studies, Rap and the Academy (1993); Passing Over (2000); Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and Black Fathers and Sons in America (2001); and Turning South Again (2001). Baker has also written I Don’t Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South (2007); and The Betrayal of Black Intellectuals (forthcoming).

A prolific contributor to numerous scholarly journals and publications as well as president of the Modern Language Association of America in 1992, Baker is considered one of the leading African American intellectuals of his time. As a visiting professor to Duke University and professor and director of the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, Baker continues to pursue a more active approach to literary studies. Among his many honors and awards, Baker was awarded the Hubbell Medal in 2003 for lifetime achievement in American Literary Studies.

JAMES BALDWIN (1924–1987) Novelist, Essayist, Playwright

James Baldwin is best known for his themes of personal and sexual identity and for his vivid depictions of the civil rights struggle in the United States. Born out of wedlock in Harlem, New York City, on August 2, 1924, James Baldwin was raised in poverty. He never knew his biological father; his mother, a domestic worker, married a factory worker who was also a storefront preacher and a violent and cruel man. Baldwin assumed the surname of his stepfather, who died in a mental institution in 1943.

A voracious reader as a child, Baldwin turned to writing after an early career as a boy preacher in Harlem’s storefront Pentecostal churches. Baldwin’s first story appeared in a church newspaper when he was about 12 years old. He attended Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem and later graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School, where he was editor of the school magazine. Three years later, he won a Eugene Saxton Fellowship, which enabled him to write full-time. Baldwin’s issues with his stepfather, his own sexual identity, the suicide of a friend, and with racism, drove him away from the United States in 1948. Baldwin resided in Paris and London, as well as in Istanbul.

Baldwin’s first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, was published in 1953 and received critical acclaim. Two years later, his first collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son, again won favorable critical acclaim. This work was followed in 1956 by the publication of his second novel, Giovanni’s Room. His second collection of essays, Nobody Knows My Name, established him as a major voice in American literature.

In 1962, Another Country, Baldwin’s third novel, was a critical and commercial success. A year later, he wrote The Fire Next Time, an immediate bestseller and regarded as one of the most brilliant essays written in the history of African American protest. Since then, two of Baldwin’s plays—Blues for Mister Charlie and The Amen Corner—have been produced on the New York stage, where they achieved modest success. His novel, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone, was published in 1968. Baldwin himself regarded it as his first “grown-up novel,” but it generated little enthusiasm among critics.

After a silence of several years, the question of whether Baldwin had stopped writing was widely debated. He published the 1974 novel, If Beale Street Could Talk. In this work, the problems besetting a ghetto family are portrayed with great sensitivity and humor. Baldwin’s skill as a novelist is evident as he conveyed his own sophisticated analyses through the mind of his protagonist, a young woman. To many critics, however, the novel lacked the undeniable relevance and fiery power of Baldwin’s early polemical essays.

Baldwin’s other works during this time include: Going to Meet the Man (short stories); No Name in the Street; One Day When I Was Lost, a scenario based on Alex Haley’s The Autobiography of Malcolm X; A Rap on Race with Margaret Mead; and A Dialogue with Nikki Giovanni. He was one of the rare authors who worked well alone or in collaboration. Other books by Baldwin include: Nothing Personal (1964) with photographs by Richard Avedon; The Devil Finds Work (1976), about the movies; his sixth novel Just Above My Head (1979); and Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood (1977), a book for children. He wrote 16 books in all.

In 1979, Baldwin’s novel, Just Above My Head, which dealt with the intertwined lives from childhood to adulthood of a gospel singer, his brother, and a young girl who is a child preacher, was published. The next year, Baldwin’s publisher released Remember This House, described as Baldwin’s “memoirs, history and biography of the civil rights movement” interwoven with the biographies of three assassinated leaders: Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Medgar Evers. Meanwhile, in his lectures, Baldwin remained pessimistic about the future of race relations.

His last three books were The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985) about the killing of 28 African American youths in Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1980s; The Price of the Ticket: Collected Non-fiction 1948–1985 (1985); and Harlem Quartet (1987).

Baldwin spent most of the remainder of his life in France. In 1986, the French government made him a commander of the Legion of Honor, France’s highest civilian award. He died of stomach cancer at his home in France, on November 30, 1987, at the age of 63.

TONI CADE BAMBARA (1939–1995) Writer

Toni Cade Bambara was born Miltona Mirkin Cade in New York City in 1939. She took the name “Toni” about the time she was in kindergarten and later took on the name “Bambara,” after finding the signature Bambara on a sketchbook located among the materials in her great-grandmother’s trunk. Bambara’s mother, who was profoundly influenced by the Harlem Renaissance and who profoundly influenced her daughter, strongly encouraged her daughter to explore her creative side and the influences of culture.

Coming of age in the 1960s and 1970s allowed Bambara to participate in both the nationalist and the women’s liberation movements. In 1970, Bambara edited The Black Woman: An Anthology, which, being the first of its kind, was recognized as beginning the renaissance of African American women’s literature. Throughout her career, much of Bambara’s writings have explored the experiences of the African American community and, in particular, the experiences of African American women.

While working in community-focused positions and pursuing her writing, Bambara received her B.A. from Queens College in New York in 1959 and her M.A. from City College of New York in 1964. Bambara’s active career in academia and her numerous awards have exemplified her desire to use art to promote the social and political welfare of the African American community—but not at the expense of the African American woman. Her works, which are infused with both laughter and rage, include: Gorilla, My Love (1972); The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977); The Salt Eaters (1980), which received the American Book Award; and If Blessing Comes (1987).

On December 9, 1995, Bambara died of colon cancer in Philadelphia. Her last novel, Those Bones Are Not My Child, was published posthumously in 1999.

AMIRI BARAKA (LEROI JONES) (1934– ) Poet, Playwright, Essayist

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. He attended Rutgers University in Newark and Howard University in Washington, D.C., and lived in Greenwich Village, New York, in the 1950s. In 1958, Baraka founded Yugen magazine, which he co-edited with his wife, Hattie Cohen, and Totem Press. From 1961 to 1964, Baraka worked as an instructor at New York’s New School for Social Research. In 1964, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School, which dissolved in only a few months. He later taught at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Buffalo, Columbia University, George Washington University, and San Francisco State University, and has served as director of the community theater, Spirit House, in Newark.

In 1961, Baraka published his first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note. His second book, The Dead Lecturer, was published in 1964. Fame eluded him, however, until the publication of his play Dutchman in 1964, which received the Obie award for the best Off-Broadway play of the season. The shocking honesty of Baraka’s treatment of racial conflict in this and later plays became the hallmark of his work.

When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, and following the close of his theater school, Baraka moved to Harlem, divorced his white, Jewish wife, Hattie Cohen, changed his name to Amiri Baraka, and became an advocate for the black nationalist movement.

In 1967, Baraka married African American poet, Sylvia Robinson, who changed her name to Amina Baraka. In 1968, Baraka became a black Muslim and added the title Imamu (spiritual leader) to his name and led his own black Muslim organization, called the Temple of Kawaida. Baraka described this organization as an “African religious institution—to increase black consciousness.” The Temple and Baraka soon became a focal point of African American political activism in the racially polarized city of Newark. In 1972, Baraka achieved prominence in his role as chairman of the National Black Political Convention.

After he began to espouse Marxist-Leninist philosophy and dedicated himself to the working class, Baraka dropped the title Imamu in 1974. In 1966, Baraka’s play, The Slave, won second prize in the drama category at the First World Festival of Dramatic Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Baraka’s other published plays include: The Toilet (1964); The Baptism (1966); The System of Dante’s Hell (1965); Four Black Revolutionary Plays (1969); J-E-L-L-O (1970); and The Motion of History and Other Plays (1978). He has edited, with Larry Neal, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (1968) and African Congress: A Documentary of the First Modern Pan-African Congress (1972).

His works of fiction include The System of Dante’s Hell (novel, 1965) and Tales (short stories, 1967). Baraka has also published the following titles: Black Music; Blues People: Negro Music in White America; Home: Social Essays; In Our Terribleness: Some Elements and Meanings in Black Style with Billy Abernathy; Raise Race Rays Raze: Essays Since 1965; It’s Nation Time; Kawaida Studies: The New Nationalism, A Black Value System and Strategy and Tactics of a Pan African Nationalist Party; and Funk Lore: New Poems (1984–1995); Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems (2003); and Tales of the Out and the Gone (2006).

In addition to the Obie Award, Baraka’s many literary prizes and honors include Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

ARNA W. BONTEMPS (1902–1973) Poet, Novelist, Dramatist

Arna Wendell Bontemps was one of the most productive African American writers of the twentieth century and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, on October 13, 1902, and raised in California, Bontemps received his B.A. degree from Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, in 1923 and his M.A. degree from the University of Chicago in 1943. In 1924, his poetry first appeared in Crisis magazine, the NAACP periodical edited by W. E. B. Du Bois. Two years later, Golgotha Is a Mountain won the Alexander Pushkin Poetry Prize and, in 1927, Nocturne at Bethesda achieved first honors in the Crisis poetry contest. Personals, Bontemps’s collected poems, was published in 1963.

In the late 1920s, Bontemps decided to try his hand at prose, and over the next decade produced such novels as God Sends Sunday (1931), Black Thunder (1936), and Drums at Dusk (1939). His books for young people include We Have Tomorrow (1945) and Story of the Negro (1948). Likewise of literary merit are such children’s books as Sad-Faced Boy (1937) and Slappy Hooper (1946). He edited American Negro Poetry and two anthologies with Langston Hughes, among others.

In 1968, Bontemps completed the editing of a volume of children’s poetry. Other publications included: One Hundred Years of Negro Freedom (1961); Anyplace But Here (published in 1966 in collaboration with Jack Conroy); Black Thunder (1968 reprint); Great Slave Narratives (1969); The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays (1972, 1984); and The Old South. He also edited several anthologies. In 1997, his book The Pasteboard Bandit was published posthumously. Bontemps died in Nashville on June 4, 1973, of a heart attack.

GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917–2000) Poet

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Brooks received this prestigious award in 1950 for Annie Allen, a volume of her poetry that had been published one year earlier. Brooks has been associated with the “black aesthetic” and the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Long a trailblazer, in 1985 she became the first African American woman to be appointed poetry consultant by the Library of Congress.

Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, but moved to Chicago at an early age. She graduated from Wilson Junior College in 1936 and identified herself with the South Side of Chicago throughout her lifetime. In 1945, she completed a book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, and was selected by Mademoiselle magazine as one of the year’s 10 most outstanding American women. She became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1946, and received Guggenheim Fellowships for 1946 and 1947. In 1949, she won the Eunice Tietjen Prize for Poetry in the annual competition sponsored by Poetry magazine for the same work that won her that year’s Pulitzer. She was named Poet Laureate of the state of Illinois in 1968.

Brooks’ insights into the potential alienation of African American life have been represented in the body of her work, which includes a collection of children’s poems, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956); a novel, Maud Martha (1953); and two books of poetry, The Bean Eaters (1960) and Selected Poems (1963). She has also written In the Mecca, winner of the 1968 Anisfield-Wolf Award; Riot; The World of Gwendolyn Brooks; Report from Part One: The Autobiography of Gwendolyn Brooks; Family Pictures; Beckonings; Aloneness; Primer for Blacks; To Disembark; Report from Part Two; and In Montgomery: New and Other Poems. Her poems and stories have also been published in magazines and two anthologies, Soon, One Morning and Beyond the Angry Black. The publication of Selected Poems in 1964 earned her the Robert F. Ferguson Memorial Award. She has edited A Broadside Treasury and Jump Bad, A New Chicago Anthology.

Among the other honors Brooks has received, Western Illinois University established The Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African American Literature in 1985. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame. She won an Essence Award that year and a Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America in 1990. In 1994, Brooks was named the year’s Jefferson lecturer by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the highest honor for intellectual achievement bestowed by the U.S. government. The same year, Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center unveiled a bronze bust of Brooks prominently located in the facility, and the National Book Foundation awarded her the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters and $10,000 for her lifetime of achievement. In 1995, Brooks received the National Medal of Arts from U.S. President Bill Clinton.

In 2000, Brooks passed away due to complications from cancer. Survivors include her daughter, Nora Brooks Blakely; son, Henry Blakely III; and a grandson. Her husband, poet and writer Henry Blakely Jr., died in 1996.

CLAUDE BROWN (1937–2002) Novelist

Claude Brown was born on February 23, 1937, in New York City. His claim to literary fame rests largely on his bestselling autobiography, Manchild in the Promised Land, which was published in 1965 when he was 28 years of age. The book is the story of Brown’s life in Harlem and, in the process, becomes a highly realistic documentary of life in the ghetto. It tells of Brown’s escapades with the Harlem Buccaneers, a “bopping gang,” and of his later involvement with the Forty Thieves, an elite stealing division of this same gang.

After attending the Wiltwyck School for emotionally disturbed and deprived boys, Brown returned to New York, was later sent to Warwick Reform School three times, and eventually made his way downtown to a small loft apartment near Greenwich Village. Changing his lifestyle, Brown finished high school and went on to graduate from Howard University in 1965.

Brown began work on his autobiography in 1963, submitting a manuscript of some 1,500 pages that was eventually cut and reworked into the finished product over a two-year period. Brown completed law school in the late 1960s and began practicing in California. In 1976, he published The Children of Ham, a story about a group of young African Americans living as a family in a condemned Harlem tenement, begging, stealing, and doing whatever was necessary to survive.

Brown died on February 2, 2002, in New York City, of a lung condition. He was 64.

WILLIAM W. BROWN (1815–1884) Novelist, Playwright

William Wells Brown was the first African American to publish a novel, the first to publish a drama, and the first to publish a travel book. Born a slave in Lexington, Kentucky, on March 15, 1815, and taken to St. Louis as a young boy, Brown worked for a time in the offices of the St. Louis Times and then took a job on a riverboat on the Mississippi. In 1834, Brown fled to Canada, taking his name from a friendly Quaker who he met there. While working as a steward on Lake Erie ships, he educated himself and became well known as a public speaker. In 1849, he went to England and Paris to attend the Peace Congress, remaining abroad for five years.

Brown’s first published work, The Narrative of William W. Brown (1847), went into three editions within eight months. A year later, a collection of his poems was published—The Anti-Slavery Harp—and in 1852, his travel book, Three Years in Europe, appeared in London. Brown’s Clotel, or, the President’s Daughter, a melodramatic novel about miscegenation, was first published in London in 1853. As the first novel by an African American (it subsequently went through two revisions), its historical importance transcends its aesthetic shortcomings.

Brown’s other books include: the first African American drama, The Escape, or a Leap for Freedom (1858);

The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863); The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and Fidelity (1867); and The Rising Son (1874).

ED BULLINS (1935– ) Playwright, Essayist, Poet

Ed Bullins was born in Philadelphia on July 2, 1935, and grew up in Los Angeles. Bullins is a writer of drama, and one of the founders of Black Arts/West in the Fillmore District of San Francisco. He patterned this experiment after the Black Arts Repertory Theater School in Harlem, which was founded and directed by Amiri Baraka. In 1977, when Daddy, the sixth play in his “Twentieth-Century Cycle,” opened at the New Federal Theatre in New York’s Henry Street Settlement, Bullins, in an interview with the New York Times, foresaw African American theatrical producers taking plays to cities with large African American populations. A leader of the African American theater movement and creator of more than 50 plays, he has yet to have a play produced on Broadway.

Bullins’ main themes are the violence and tragedy of drug abuse and the oppressive lifestyle of the ghetto. He presents his material in a realistic and natural style. Between 1965 and 1968, he wrote The Rally; How Do You Do; Goin’ a Buffalo; Clara’s Old Man; The Electronic Nigger; and In the Wine Time. He has also produced The Fabulous Miss Marie.

He has been a creative member of Black Arts Alliance, working with Baraka in producing films on the West Coast. Bullins has been connected with the New Lafayette Theater in Harlem, where he was a resident playwright. His books include: Five Plays; New Plays from the Black Theatre (editor); The Reluctant Rapist; The New Lafayette Theatre Presents; The Theme Is Blackness; Four Dynamite Plays; The Duplex; The Hungered One: Early Writings; and How Do You Do: A Nonsense Drama.

In 1995, Bullins took up the position of professor of theater, and distinguished artist in residence at Northeastern University. He held this position until 2000. He is Artistic Director of the Roxbury Crossroads Theatre in Roxbury, Massachusetts.

Bullins is the recipient of a number of honors, awards, and fellowships, including three Obie awards for distinguished playwriting.

OCTAVIA E. BUTLER (1947–2006) Novelist

Born in Pasadena, California, on June 22, 1947, Octavia Butler was a graduate of Pasadena City College. She attended science fiction workshops, including the Clarion Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop, and was a member of Science Fiction Writers of America. Her writing focused on the impact of race and gender on future society. In 1985, Butler won three of science fiction’s highest honors for her novella, Bloodchild: and Other Stories: the Nebula, Hugo, and Locus awards. She also won a Hugo in 1984 for her short story “Speech Sounds.” The 1987 novella, The Evening and the Morning and the Night, was nominated for a Nebula Award. In 1995, Butler won a MacArthur Foundation fellowship.

Butler’s other works include the Patternmaster series, consisting of the novels Patternmaster (1976), Mind of My Mind (1977), Survivor (1978), Wild Seed (1980), and Clay’s Ark (1984); the historical fantasy Kindred (1979); the Xenogenesis Trilogy, Dawn: Xenogenesis (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989); the dystopian Parable of the Sower (1993); and a sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998). She has also served as a contributor to such science fiction publications as Clarion, Future Life, and Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Butler died after striking her head during a fall at her home in Lake Forest Park, Seattle, in 2006.

BARBARA CHASE-RIBOUD. SEEVISUAL AND APPLIED ARTS CHAPTER.

CHARLES W. CHESNUTT (1858–1932) Novelist

Called the first major African American fiction writer and the first of his race to balance African American and white characters in an African American novel, Charles Waddell Chesnutt holds a prominent place in American literary history. His best fiction dealt with the themes of prejudice, social injustice, and segregation. He handled satire entertainingly, and he was direct and insightful in his nonfiction works and speeches.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio, on June 20, 1858, Chesnutt moved to North Carolina with his family at the age of eight. Largely self-educated, he was admitted to the Ohio bar in 1887, the same year in which his first story “The Goophered Grapevine” was published in the Atlantic Monthly. This was followed in 1899 by two collections of his stories: The Conjure Woman, and The Wife of His Youth.

Chesnutt’s first novel, The House Behind the Cedars (1900), dealt with a young girl’s attempt to “pass” for white. A year later, The Marrow of Tradition examined the violence of the post-Reconstruction period. His final novel, The Colonel’s Dream, was published in 1905 and typified Chesnutt’s ingratiating approach to his art—an approach that the writers of the Harlem School were later to reject. Chesnutt also wrote a biography Frederick Douglass (1899). He died on November 15, 1932.

ALICE CHILDRESS (1920–1994) Playwright, Novelist

Born to a working-class family in Charleston, South Carolina, on October 12, 1920, but moved to and attended public school in Harlem. Actress and author Alice Childress studied acting at the American Negro Theatre and attended Radcliffe Institute from 1966 to 1968, through a Harvard University appointment as a scholar-writer. During this time, she became involved in a number of social causes. Her plays are Florence (one-act play); Gold Through the Trees; Just a Little Simple (based on Langston Hughes’s Simple Speaks His Mind); Trouble in Mind; Wedding Band; Wine in the Wilderness; and When the Rattlesnake Sounds: A Play About Harriet Tubman.

Childress also edited Black Scenes (1971), excerpts from plays in the Zenith series for children. Her other books include: Like One of the Family: Conversations from a Domestic’s Life (1956); A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich (novel, 1973)—one of her most influential and controversial works; A Short Walk (1979); Rainbow Jordan (1981); and Many Closets (1987). Childress’s play Trouble in Mind won the Obie Award in 1956, as the best original off-Broadway production. In the 1980s, she wrote a play based on the life of African American comedienne Jackie (Moms) Mabley. The play was produced in New York City. Childress was the first woman to win an Obie Award, and the first black woman to have a play professionally produced on Broadway. Childress’s work was noted for its frank treatment of racial issues, its compassionate yet discerning characterizations, and its universal appeal. Her books and plays often dealt with such controversial subjects as miscegenation and teenage drug addiction. Childress died of cancer complications on August 14, 1994.

J. CALIFORNIA COOPER (19??– ) Short Story Writer, Novelist, Playwright

Joan California Cooper was born to Joseph and Maxine Cooper in Berkeley, California. She attended a technical high school and studied at San Francisco State College and the University of California. Cooper has also lived in Texas and Alaska; she currently resides in Northern California. Cooper decided to keep her first name silent; thus, she uses the initial of her first name. Cooper adopted the name “California” after an individual compared her writing to that of Tennessee Williams, who added the name of a state to his nomenclature. Cooper, who believes that age is unimportant, refuses to reveal the year of her birth. Although the public knows little about Cooper’s private life, her writing talent has brought her to the attention of the literary world.

Cooper once stated that she could tell stories before she could write. During her childhood, she created plays and performed them for family and friends. To date, she is the author of at least 17 plays, including Everytime It Rains; System, Suckers, and Success; How Now; The Unintended; The Mother; Ahhh; Strangers, for which Cooper was named San Francisco’s Best Black Playwright in 1978; and Loners, which is included in Eileen J. Ostrow’s Center Stage (1981). Her plays have been performed in such theaters as the Berkeley Black Repertory Theatre and the San Francisco Palace of Fine Arts; Cooper’s plays have also been performed on college campuses, public television, and radio. After Alice Walker read Cooper’s plays, she encouraged Cooper to write short stories. Cooper once commented that her stories could still be in a drawer had it not been for Walker.

Walker’s publishing company, Wild Trees Press, published Cooper’s first collection of short stories, A Piece of Mine (1984). In Walker’s forward to A Piece of Mine, she wrote that “in its strong folk flavor, Cooper’s work reminds us of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Like theirs, her style is deceptively simple and direct, and the vale of tears in which some of her characters reside is never so deep that a rich chuckle at a foolish person’s foolishness cannot be heard.” Cooper’s second collection, Homemade Love (1986), won the 1989 American Book Award. Her subsequent short story collections are Some Soul to Keep (1987), The Matter Is Life (1991), Some Love, Some Pain, Sometime (1995), and The Future Has a Past (2000). Collectively, these six volumes contain 52 stories. She has also published a collection of stories entitled Wild Stars Seeking Midnight Suns (2006). Her short stories have been reprinted in various publications such as Daughters of Africa: An International Anthology of Words and Writings by Women of African Descent from the Ancient Egyptian to the Present (1992), edited by Margaret Busby; and Cornerstones: An Anthology of African American Literature (1996), edited by Melvin Donaldson. Cooper has published four novels: Family (1991), In Search of Satisfaction (1994), The Wake of the Wind (1998), and Some People, Some Other Place (2004).

Cooper’s additional awards include the Literary Lion Award and James Baldwin Award, both from the American Library Association, and she was named Woman of the Year by the University of Massachusetts and Best Female Writer in Texas. J. California Cooper is one of today’s most popular African American authors.

COUNTEE CULLEN (1903–1946) Poet

Born Countee LeRoy Porter on May 30, 1903, in Baltimore, the details of Cullen’s early life are sketchy. He was orphaned at an early age and adopted at age 15 by Rev. Frederick Cullen, pastor of New York’s Salem Methodist Church. At New York University, Cullen won Phi Beta Kappa honors and was awarded the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize. In 1925, while still a student at New York University, Cullen completed Color, a volume of poetry that received the Harmon Foundation’s first gold medal for literature two years later.

In 1926, Cullen earned his M.A. at Harvard, and a year later finished both The Ballad of the Brown Girl and Copper Sun. This was followed in 1929 by The Black Christ, written during a two-year sojourn in France on a Guggenheim fellowship. In 1927, he edited Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets. The book was reprinted in 1972.

Upon his return to New York City, Cullen began a teaching career in the public school system. During this period, he also produced a novel, One Way to Heaven (1932), The Medea and Other Poems (1935), The Lost Zoo (1940), and My Lives and How I Lost Them (1942, 1971). Throughout his life, Cullen promoted the works of other African American writers and was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. In 1947, a year after his death, Cullen’s own selections of his best work were collected in a volume published under the title On TheseI Stand. Cullen died of uremic poisoning on January 9, 1946, in New York City.

SAMUEL R. DELANY (1942– ) Novelist, Literary Critic

Born in Harlem on April 1, 1942, and a published writer at the age of 19, Samuel Ray Delany is an award-winning and prolific writer of science fiction, novelettes, and novels. His first book was The Jewels of Aptor (1962), followed by Captives of the Flame (1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), City of a Thousand Suns (1965), The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Babel-17 (1966), Empire Star (1966), The Einstein Intersection (1967), Out of the Dead City (1968), and Nova (1968). Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection both won Nebula awards from the Science Fiction Writers of America, as did his short stories “Aye, and Gomorrah” and “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones,” which also won a Hugo Award at the World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg. Delany co-edited the speculative fiction quarterly Quark, Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4 with his former wife, award-winning poet Marilyn Hacker. He also wrote, directed, and edited the half-hour film, The Orchid. In 1975, Delany was Visiting Butler Chair professor of English at the State University of New York at Buffalo. In 2001, he was named professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Delany’s other books include: Distant Stars (1981); Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984); Flight from Neveryon (1985); Neveryona (1986); The Bridge of Lost Desire (1988); the controversial Hogg (1996); the novella, Phallos (2004); and the novel, Dark Reflections (scheduled for 2007). His non-fiction works include: The Jewel-Hinged Jaw; The American Shore; Starboard Wine; The Straits of Messina; The Motion of Light in Water (autobiography, 1988); The Mad Man (1994); They Fly at Ciron (1995); Atlantis: Three Tales (1995); Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999); and Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts & the Politics of the Paraliterary (1999).

RITA DOVE (1952– ) Poet, Educator

Rita Dove was born on August 28, 1952, in Akron, Ohio. She received a B.A. from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 1973, and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa in 1977. Dove also attended the University of Tubingen in Germany in 1974 and 1975.

Dove began her teaching career at Arizona State University in 1981 as an assistant professor. She spent 1982 as a writer-in-residence at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University). By 1984, she was an associate professor and by 1987, a full professor. Dove, who has served on the editorial boards of the literary journals Callaloo, Gettysburg Review, and TriQuarterly, joined

the University of Virginia’s English Department in 1989. She teaches creative writing.

Dove won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for a collection titled Thomas and Beulah. Her themes are universal, encompassing much of the human condition and occasionally commenting on racial issues. She also published Yellow House on the Corner (1980), Museum (1983), Fifth Sunday (short stories, 1985), Grace Notes (1989), Selected Poems (1993), Through the Ivory Gate (novel, 1993), Mother Love (1995), The Darker Face of the Earth: A Verse Play in Fourteen Scenes (1995); and On the Bus With Rosa Parks (1999); and American Smooth (poems, 2004).

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Dove won many honors including Presidential scholar (1970); Fulbright scholar (1974, 1975); a literary grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (1978, 1989); Guggenheim fellow (1983, 1984); General Electric Foundation Award for Younger Poets (1987); Ohio Governor’s Award (1988); Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship (1988, 1989); University of Virginia Center for Advanced Studies fellow (1989–1992); the Walt Whitman Award (1990); and the Kennedy Center Fund for New American Plays Award for The Darker Face of the Earth (1995).

Dove was named U.S. Poet Laureate, a one-year Library of Congress post, in 1993. She was the first African American and the youngest person ever to earn the appointment. On April 22, 1994, PBS aired a piece entitled “Poet Laureate Rita Dove” on Bill Moyer’s Journal. She hoped to use the position to revive public interest in serious literature.

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR (1872–1906) Poet, Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist

The first African American poet to gain a national reputation in the United States, Paul Laurence Dunbar was also the first to use African American dialect within the formal structure of his work. He was a precursor to the Harlem Renaissance. Born of former slaves in Dayton, Ohio, on June 27, 1872, Dunbar worked as an elevator operator after graduating from high school. His first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was privately printed in 1893 and was followed by Majors and Minors, which appeared two years later. Neither book was an immediate sensation, but there were enough favorable reviews in such magazines as Harper’s to encourage Dunbar in the pursuit of a full-fledged literary career. In 1896, Dunbar completed Lyrics of a Lowly Life, the single work upon which his subsequent reputation was irrevocably established.

Before his untimely death of tuberculosis in 1906, Dunbar had become the dominant presence in the world of African American poetry. His later works included: Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905); Li’l Gal (1904); Howdy, Honey, Howdy (1905); A Plantation Portrait (1905); Joggin’ Erlong (1906); and Complete Poems, published posthumously in 1913. This last work contains not only the dialect poems that were his trademark, but many poems in conventional English as well. The book enjoyed such enormous popularity that it has, to this day, never gone out of print. He also published four novels, including The Sport of Gods (1902)—considered his best, The Love of Landry (1900), and The Uncalled (1898), and four volumes of short stories.

Dunbar, whose work was rediscovered in the second half of the twentieth century, is sometimes referred to as the African American Alexander Pushkin or Alexander Dumas, fils.

RALPH ELLISON (1914–1994) Novelist, Essayist

Ralph Ellison’s critical and artistic reputation rests largely on a single masterpiece, his first and only novel, Invisible Man, a story about an unnamed black man’s search for identity in 1940s New York. An instant classic, the novel was given the National Book Award for fiction in 1952 and the Russwurm Award in 1953. Years in the making, the novel’s success heralded the emergence of a major writing talent. Ellison worked at a second novel for more than 40 years, but at the time of his death, the untitled work was still incomplete.

Ellison was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, on March 1, 1914, and came to New York City in the late 1930s, after having studied music at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) for three years. Initially interested in sculpture, he turned to writing after coming under the influence of T.S. Eliot’s poetry and as a direct consequence of his friendship with novelist Richard Wright. He worked for the Federal Writer’s Project and wrote for a variety of publications during the late 1930s to early 1940s. In 1942, he became the managing editor of the Negro Quarterly. He began writing Invisible Man in 1945. During World War II, Ellison worked as a cook in the U.S. Merchant Marines.

In addition to the National Book Award, Ellison won a Rockefeller Foundation Award in 1954; was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters; received a Medal of Freedom from President Lyndon Johnson in 1969; was named chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres by France in 1969; and was given a National Medal of Arts in 1985. Ellison was the recipient of more than one dozen honorary degrees including doctor of letters degrees from Harvard University (1974) and Wesleyan University (1980). Three years after the publication of Invisible Man, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded Ellison the Prix de Rome, which enabled him to live and write in Italy until 1957.

Back in the United States, Ellison began an academic career. He taught Russian and American literature courses at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, for three years and spent the early 1960s as a visiting professor at University of Chicago, Yale, and Rutgers, where he was a writer-in-residence. From 1970 to 1980, Ellison was the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University.

Ellison’s second work was a book of essays entitled Shadow and Act. Published in 1964, excerpts from the book have been printed in several literary journals. Ellison began writing his second novel Juneteenth in 1954 and continued to revise it until he died. A 1967 fire destroyed 350 pages of his unfinished second novel’s manuscript. In 1982, the thirtieth anniversary edition of Invisible Man, with a new introduction by Ellison, was published. In 1986, a second collection of essays and talks was published as Going to the Territory. The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, edited by John F. Callahan, was published posthumously in 1995.

Ellison died of pancreatic cancer in New York City on April 16, 1994. On May 26, 1994, a memorial tribute to him was held at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York.

MARI EVANS (1923– ) Poet

Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1923, Evans studied at the University of Toledo. Evans is best known as a poet and social critic but also published plays, songs, and children’s books. In 1963, her poetry was published in Phylon, Negro Digest, and Dialog. Two years later, she was awarded a John Hay Whitney Fellowship. One of her better known works is The Alarm Clock, which deals with the rude awakening of the African American to the white “establishment.” This work captures and summarizes the civil rights scene of the 1960s in the United States.

Evans’ books include: I Am a Black Woman; Where Is All the Music?; Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984), edited by Evans, covering 15 African American women poets, novelists, and playwrights; Nightstar: Poems from 1973–1978 (1980); J. D.; I Look at Me; Singing Black; The Day They Made Benani; Jim Flying High; (co-author) Mis Taken Brilliance (1993); (co-author) Singing Black: Alternative Nursery Rhymes for Children (1998); Dear Corinne, Tell Somebody! Love, Annie: A Book about Secrets (1999); and Clarity as Concept: A Poet’s Perspective (critical essays, 2005).

Evans has taught at Cornell University and Indiana University.

JESSIE REDMON FAUSET (1882–1961) Writer, Editor, Educator

Jessie Redmon Fauset, born April 27, 1882, was a central figure during the Harlem Renaissance—and sometimes called “the Mother of the Harlem Renaissance”—not only for encouraging the careers of many of the major writers of the time, but also through her own literary contributions to the movement. In 1919, Fauset became literary editor of Crisis magazine, founded by W. E. B. Du Bois. She held that position until 1927. As an editor, Fauset excelled; under her leadership, Crisis magazine outsold its rival magazine, Opportunity, started by Charles S. Johnson. She also realized Du Bois’s plan for a periodical focusing on children six to 16 called The Brownies Book and was its functional editor.

Fauset’s editorial experiences and travel heightened her own sensibilities about the images of African Americans. Her writings professed an awareness of the racism and sexism that existed during the 1920s and 1930s. She contributed numerous short stories, essays, critiques, poetry, and reviews to the magazine and published her first novel There is Confusion in 1924. The book was her response to an unrealistic portrayal of African Americans by white novelist T. S. Stribling. After Fauset’s break from Crisis in 1927, she established her place as an author and published Plum Bun: A Novel without a Moral (1929), The Chinaberry Tree (1931), and Comedy, American Style (1933).

Fauset, who had received her B.A. from Cornell University in 1905 (Phi Beta Kappa)—the first black woman to matriculate at Cornell—and her M.A. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1919, taught at both Fisk University in the summer and in high school and college settings. In he later years, she returned to teaching, partially because the publishing world was still not ready for an African American, let alone a woman.

Fauset died in Philadelphia on April 30, 1961, of hypertensive heart disease. Recently, Fauset’s contribution to the dialogue about race, class, and gender have been more fully recognized in her work. She not only challenged the world of publishing with her own work but also by assisting other artists, made it possible for unrealistic and negative perceptions of African Americans to be confronted.

RUDOLPH FISHER (1897–1934) Writer, Physician, Community Leader

Although he was a radiologist, Rudolph Fisher was best known as a leading writer during the Harlem Renaissance. Fisher wrote short stories and novels that depicted real life in the Harlem community and was also the first African American to write detective fiction.

Fisher was born on May 9, 1897, in Washington, D.C. He grew up in a middle-class family who saw that he was rigorously educated at primary and secondary schools in Providence, Rhode Island, and New York City. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with B.A. and M.A. degrees. In 1924, Fisher

graduated summa cum laude from Howard University Medical School in Washington. During his medical internship at Freedmen’s Hospital in the same city, he published his first short story, “The City of Refuge,” in the Atlantic Monthly.

Continuing his medical education, from 1925 to 1927 Fisher trained at Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. He entered private practice and continued his writing as well, publishing five short stories in Atlantic Monthly and McClure’s, an essay in American Mercury, and an article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases.

Fisher published his first novel, The Walls of Jericho, in 1928. In the novel, Fisher blends all of Harlem life into one story and bridges the gap between the classes. The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem (1932) was his second novel and the first full-length detective novel with all-African American characters published by an African American author. Fisher published two children’s stories in 1932 and 1933, Ezekiel and Ezekiel Learns, and in 1933, he published two short stories “Guardians of the Law” and “Miss Cynthie.” The latter work also appeared in Best Short Stories of 1934.

In addition to his writing career, Fisher was superintendent of the International Hospital in Manhattan from 1929 to 1932 and was also a gifted musician. Between 1930 and 1934, he was a roentgenologist for the New York City Health Department and served in the 369th Infantry. He died of cancer on December 16, 1934, in New York City.

CHARLES FULLER (1939– ) Playwright

Charles Fuller was born on March 5, 1939, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He became stage struck in his high school days when he went to the Old Walnut Street Theater in his native Philadelphia and saw a Yiddish play starring Molly Picon and Menasha Skulnik. He did not understand a word of it, saying “but it was live theater, and I felt myself responding to it.”

In 1959, Fuller entered the army and served in Japan and South Korea, after which he attended Villanova University and La Salle College. While Fuller was working as a housing inspector in Philadelphia, the McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey produced his first play, The Village: A Party (1968), also known as The Perfect Party. The theme concerned interracial marriage, and its creator later tagged it “one of the world’s worst interracial plays.” However, during this time he met members of The Negro Ensemble Company (NEC) and, in 1974, he wrote his first play, In the Deepest Part of Sleep, for them. For NEC’s tenth anniversary, Fuller wrote The Brownsville Raid about the African American soldiers who were dishonorably discharged on President Teddy Roosevelt’s orders in 1906 after a shootout in Brownsville, Texas. The play was a hit, and Fuller followed it a few seasons later with Zooman and the Sign, a melodrama that won two Obie awards.

A Soldier’s Play, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1982, was his fourth play for The Negro Ensemble Company. This drama dealing with a murder set in a backwater New Orleans army camp in 1944, opened NEC’s 15th anniversary season in 1981 with a long run and was hailed by the New York Times as “tough, taut and fully realized.” A Soldier’s Play became A Soldier’s Story when it was produced as a film in 1984 by Columbia Pictures. Fuller wrote the screenplay, and African American actor Howard E. Rollins Jr. was the film’s star. In 1999, Fuller wrote and produced a three-part interlocking script called Love Songs for Showtime. The three different sections featured Louis Gossett Jr., Robert Townsend, and Andre Braugher.

The recipient of the Guggenheim Foundation fellowship, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts and CAPS fellowships in playwriting, Fuller describes himself as a playwright who happens to be African American, rather than an African American playwright.

ERNEST J. GAINES (1933– ) Novelist, Short Story Writer

Ernest J. Gaines was born on a plantation in Oscar, Louisiana, on January 15, 1933. The rural folk culture of this area has always played an important role in his fiction. He moved to California in 1949, where he did his undergraduate study at San Francisco State College. In 1959, he received the Wallace Stegner Fellowship in creative writing. The following year, he was awarded the Joseph Henry Jackson Literary Award.

Gaines’ first novel was Catherine Carmier (1964). Others followed, including Of Love and Dust (1967), Barren Summer (completed in 1963, but never published), The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971), A Warm Day in November (for young people), and In My Father’s House (1978). Ironically, the book, The Autobiography of Jane Pittman, was banned in a Conroe, Texas, seventh-grade racial tolerance course in 1995; the school censored the work, citing the liberal use of racial slurs. The 1974 television production of The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, starring Cicely Tyson, boosted Gaines’ reputation. Gaines’ A Gathering of Old Men, published in 1983, was made into a movie as well. In 1994, Gaines’ 1993 work, A Lesson Before Dying, won the National Book Critics Circle award for fiction. A Lesson Before Dying was also adapted for the small screen by HBO in 1999 and won an Emmy Award for Outstanding Made-for-Television Movie. Mozart and Leadbelly: Stories and Essays was published in 2005.

HENRY LOUIS GATES, JR. (1950– ) Literary critic, Scholar, Educator

Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was born in Keyser, West Virginia, on September 16, 1950. His father, Henry Louis Sr., who was a gifted storyteller, worked at the local paper mill; his mother cleaned houses in addition to raising her two children and was actively involved in her children’s education.

Initially enrolling in Potomac State College, Gates later transferred to Yale, where he graduated with a B.A. in History. At Yale, Gates volunteered at a mission hospital in Tanzania and traveled throughout Africa in fulfillment of the non-academic portion of his degree requirement.

Gates then traveled to Cambridge University, where he studied English literature and, with the aid of a Ford Foundation Fellowship, worked toward his M.A. and Ph.D. in English. At Cambridge, he met the Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, who was denied an appointment because, at the time, African literature was not considered “real literature.” Soyinka, who later went on to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, became Gates’ mentor.

After dropping out of the Yale Law School and working as a secretary in the Afro-American Studies department, in 1976 Gates became a lecturer, then an Assistant Professor in the department. Denied tenure at Yale, Gates went on to teach at Cornell University, Duke University, then Harvard, where he was appointed Professor of the Humanities and English. He is also Chair of the African and African American Studies department and directs the W.E.B. DuBois Institute for African and African American Research. In 2006, Gates was named Alphonse Fletcher, Jr. University Professor at Harvard.

In addition to Gates’ many honors and awards, Gates was named a MacArthur Foundation Fellow in 1981. Gates, a literary theorist, cultural critic, and historian dedicated preserving the texts of African and African American writers and artists, published The Signifying Monkey in 1988. This seminal work, which attempted to define a black cultural aesthetic, won the 1989 American Book Award. Gates’ position between separatist and traditionalist perspectives in his approach to integrating African American literature into the canon of Western literature has stirred controversy on both sides of the cultural spectrum. Gates works also include Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (1992); A Memoir (1994); Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man (1997); Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African Experience (1999); and The African American Century: How Black Americans Have Shaped Our Century (2000). He has also edited numerous books and has been involved in a number of educational projects for public television.

Gates married Sharon Lynn Adams in 1979 and has two daughters.

NIKKI GIOVANNI (1943– ) Poet, Educator, Activist

Nikki Giovanni was born Yolande Cornelia Giovanni in Knoxville, Tennessee, on June 7, 1943, but she was raised in Cincinnati, Ohio. She studied at the University of Cincinnati from 1961 to 1963 and received her B.A. from Fisk University in 1967. She also attended the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Work for one year and Columbia University School of the Arts for one year in the late 1960s.

In 1969, Giovanni taught at Queens College (CUNY) and Rutgers University before founding a communications and publishing company called NikTom, Ltd. In the midto late-1980s, she resumed teaching, spending the year of 1984 as a visiting professor at Ohio State University and the subsequent three years at Mount Joseph on the Ohio as a creative writing professor. Since 1987, Giovanni has taught at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, first as a visiting professor and then as a full professor of English beginning in 1989. That year, she also directed the Warm Hearth Writer’s Workshop. From 1990 to

1993, Giovanni served on the board of directors for the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and Public Policy.

Giovanni’s first book of poetry, Black Feeling, Black Talk, published in the mid-1960s, was followed by Black Judgment in 1968. These two works were combined as Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment in 1970. By 1974, Giovanni’s poems could be found in many African American literature anthologies, and she also became a media personality through her television appearances, during which she read her poetry. Many of her poems were put to soul or gospel music accompaniment. Such recordings include: Truth Is on Its Way, winner of the National Association of Radio and Television Announcers Award in 1972; and Spirit to Spirit, a videocassette produced by PBS, winner of the Oakland Museum Film Festival Silver Apple Award in 1988.

Giovanni’s first poetry collections were considered revolutionary and filtered experience through a black perspective. Later in her career, her experience as a mother was a major driving force in her poetry.

A prolific author, Giovanni’s books include: Re: Creation (poetry); Spin a Soft Black Song: Poems for Children; Night Comes Softly: Anthology of Black Female Voices (non-fiction); My House (poetry); Gemini: An Extended Autobiographical Statement (nonfiction); Ego Tripping and Other Poems for Young People; A Dialogue: James Baldwin and Nikki Giovanni (nonfiction); and A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walke (nonfiction). Her other works include: The Women and the Men: Poems (1975); Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (poetry, 1978); Vacation Time: Poems for Children (1980), dedicated to her son, Tommy, and winner of the Children’s Reading Roundtable of Chicago Award; Those Who Ride the Night Winds (poetry, 1984); Sacred Cows . . . and Other Edibles (nonfiction, 1988), winner of the Ohioana Library Award in 1988; Grand Mothers: Poems, Reminiscences, and Short Stories About the Keepers of Our Traditions (1994); Racism 101 (nonfiction); Knoxville, Tennessee (coauthored with Larry Johnson, 1994); The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (1995); Blues for all the Changes (collection of poems, 1999); Grand Fathers: Reminiscences, Poems, Recipes, and Photos of the Keepers of Our Traditions (1999); and Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (poems, 2002).

Giovanni won several awards throughout her career including the Highest Achievement Award in 1971 from Mademoiselle; life membership to the National Council of Negro Women in 1973; the Outstanding Woman of Tennessee in 1985; the Cincinnati Post Post-Corbett Award in 1986; the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contribution to Arts and Letters in 1996; the NAACP Image Award for Literature in 1998; and a Governor’s Award in the Arts from the Tennessee Arts Commission in 1999. In addition, Giovanni received honorary degrees from numerous institutions. She was appointed Professor of English and Gloria D. Smith Professor of Black Studies at Virginia Tech.

ELOISE GREENFIELD (1929– ) Children’s Author

Born Eloise Little on May 17, 1929, in Parmele, North Carolina, Greenfield moved to Washington, D.C., as a baby and grew up happily in a close-knit, public housing development in an urban neighborhood. After attending Minor Teachers College, she worked in various clerical and secretarial positions. By 1950, she had begun experimenting with creative writing. After years of studying and persevering, Greenfield met fellow writers and made valuable contacts when she joined the District of Columbia Black Writers Workshop in the early 1970s. Soon thereafter, her picture book Bubbles was published.

With that initial success, Greenfield established her own niche within the arena of children’s books and has published, on average, one book each year. Having a goal of encouraging children to develop positive attitudes about themselves, Greenfield’s stories capture both the unique and universal experiences of growing up as an African American. Much of her fiction, as in the novel Sister, is concerned with bonding within African American families. Greenfield’s biographies of distinguished African Americans and poetic picture books have appeared on notable book lists and have placed the author in demand as a speaker at writers’ conferences and in classrooms of her young fans.

Greenfield has also published William and the Good Old Days (1993); Sweet Baby Coming (1994); Honey, I Love (1995); On My Horse (1995); For the Love of the Game: Michael Jordan and Me (1996); Angels (1998); Water, Water (1999); I can Draw a Weeposaur (2001); How They Got Over (2002); and In the Land of Words (2003).

Her many honors and awards include the 1990 Recognition of Merit Award, the Award for Excellence in Poetry for Children, given by the National Council of Teachers of English, and in 1999 she became a member of the National Literary Hall of Fame for Writers of African Descent.

ALEX HALEY (1921–1992) Journalist, Novelist

The author of the widely acclaimed novel, Roots, was born Alexander Palmer Haley in Ithaca, New York, on August 11, 1921, and reared in Henning, Tennessee. The oldest of three sons of a college professor father and a mother who taught grade school, Haley graduated from high school at 15 and attended college for two years before enlisting in the United States Coast Guard as a messboy in 1939.

A voracious reader, Haley began writing short stories while at sea, but it took eight years before small magazines began accepting his stories. By 1952, the Coast Guard had created a new rating for Haley—chief journalist—and he began handling United States Coast Guard public relations. In 1959, after 20 years of military service, he retired from the Coast Guard and launched a new career as a freelance writer. He eventually became an assignment writer for Reader’s Digest and moved on to Playboy, where he initiated the “Playboy Interviews” feature.

One of the personalities Haley interviewed was Malcolm X—an interview that inspired Haley’s first book, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). Translated into eight languages, the book has sold more than six million copies. Pursuing the few slender clues of oral family history told to him by his maternal grandmother in Tennessee, Haley spent the next 12 years traveling three continents tracking his maternal family back to a Man-dingo youth named Kunta Kinte, who was kidnapped into slavery from the small village of Juffure in Gambia, West Africa. During this period, Haley lectured extensively in the United States and in Great Britain on his discoveries about his family in Africa and wrote many magazine articles on his research in the 1960s and the

1970s. He received several honorary doctor of letters degrees for his work.

The book Roots, excerpted in Reader’s Digest in 1974 and heralded for several years, was finally published in the fall of 1976 with very wide publicity and reviews. In January 1977, ABC-TV produced a 12-hour series based on the book, which set records for the number of viewers. With cover stories, book reviews, and interviews with Haley in scores of magazines and many newspaper articles, the book became the number one national bestseller, sold in the millions, and was published as a paperback in 1977. Roots truly became a phenomenon. It was serialized in the New York Post and the Long Island Press. Instructional packages, lesson plans based on Roots, and other books about Roots for schools were published, along with records and tapes by Haley.

Haley’s book stimulated interest in Africa and in African American genealogy. The United States Senate passed a resolution paying tribute to Haley and comparing Roots to Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe in the 1850s. The book received many awards including the National Book Award for 1976 special citation of merit in history and a special Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for making an important contribution to the literature of slavery.

Roots was not without its critics, however. A 1977 lawsuit brought by Margaret Walker charged that Roots plagiarized her novel Jubilee. Another author, Harold Courlander, also filed a suit charging that Roots plagiarized his novel, The African. Courlander received a settlement after several passages in Roots were found to be almost verbatim from The African. Haley claimed that researchers helping him had given him this material without citing the source.

Haley received the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1977. Four thousand deans and department heads of colleges and universities throughout the country in a survey conducted by Scholastic Magazine selected Haley as America’s foremost achiever in the literature category. The ABC-TV network presented another series Roots: The Next Generation in February 1979 (also written by Haley). Roots had sold almost 5 million copies by December 1978, and had been reprinted in 23 languages.

In 1988, Haley conducted a promotional tour for a novella titled A Different Kind of Christmas about slave escapes in the 1850s. He also promoted a drama Roots: The Gift, a two-hour television program shown in December 1988. This story revolved around two principal characters from Roots who are involved in a slave break for freedom on Christmas Eve. Haley’s drama, Queen, which he had begun writing before his death, and was completed by David Stevens, was aired on television in 1998 and starred Halle Berry. Stevens also completed Haley’s novel, Mama Flora’s Family, in 1998, and this novel was also made into a film.

Haley died February 10, 1992, of a heart attack.

VIRGINIA HAMILTON (1936–2002) Children’s and Young Adult Author

Virginia Hamilton was born on March 12, 1936, into a large extended family in rural Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her career as an author was directly influenced by her parents, who were avid storytellers themselves. She attended nearby Antioch College from 1952 to 1955, ultimately graduating from Ohio State University in 1958. Determined to be a writer, Hamilton settled in New York City and studied the craft at the New School for Social Research. She worked at a variety of jobs and moved back to Yellow Springs before publishing her first book Zeely in 1967. Issued during an era of racial strife, Zeely was one of the first books for young readers in which African American characters were portrayed as people living with average, universal circumstances as opposed to constantly dealing with politically and racially related problems, such as integration.

After her second novel, The House of Dies Dreary, received the 1968 Edgar Allen Poe Award for best juvenile mystery of the year, Hamilton went on to write and edit more than 30 children’s and young adult books within various genres. Her canon includes well-researched historical fiction, contemporary urban novels about teenagers, science fiction and supernatural tales, biographies of the historical figures Paul Robeson and W. E. B. Du Bois, and collections of African American folklore and slavery era “liberation” stories.

Hamilton has been repeatedly honored for her work. Her awards include the Hans Christian Andersen Medal, Newbery Honor Book Award, National Book Award, Coretta Scott King Award, and the MacArthur Foundation Prize in 1995. Many of her works have appeared on notable best books lists, and she has inspired an Annual Virginia Hamilton Conference. Hamilton stands as one of the predominant creative forces behind multicultural works for young readers.

On February 19, 2002, Hamilton died in Dayton, Ohio, of breast cancer. She was 65.

JUPITER HAMMON (1711–?) Poet, Tract Writer

Jupiter Hammon was born October 17, 1711, probably near Oyster Bay on Long Island, New York. He was one of the first African American poets to have his work published in the United States. An Evening Thought, Salvation by Christ, with Penitential Cries appeared in 1761, when Hammon was a slave belonging to a Mr. Lloyd of Long Island, New York.

Due to his fondness for preaching, the major portion of Hammon’s poetry is religious in tone and is usually dismissed by critics as being of little aesthetic value because of its pious platitudes, faulty syntax, and forced rhymes. Hammon’s best-known work is a prose piece, “An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York,” which he delivered before the African Society of New York City on September 24, 1786. This famous speech, which draws on Christian themes to promote gradual emancipation, was published the following year, went into three editions, and appears in anthologies to the present day.

Hammon died between 1790 and 1806.

LORRAINE HANSBERRY (1930–1965) Playwright

Born in Chicago on May 19, 1930, Hansberry studied art at Chicago’s Art Institute, the University of Wisconsin, and, finally, in Guadalajara, Mexico. Hansberry wrote the award-winning play, A Raisin in the Sun, while living in New York’s Greenwich Village, having conceived the play after reacting negatively to what she called “a whole body of material about Negroes. Cardboard characters. Cute dialect bits. Or hip-swinging musicals from exotic scores.” The play opened on Broadway on March 11, 1959, at a time when it was generally held that all plays dealing with African Americans were “death” at the box office. Produced, directed, and performed by African Americans, it was later made into a successful movie starring Sidney Poitier. It was then adapted into Raisin,a musical that won a Tony Award in 1974.

Hansberry’s second Broadway play, The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window, dealt with “the western intellectual poised in hesitation before the flames of involvement.” Shortly after its Broadway opening, Hansberry succumbed to cancer on January 12, 1965, in New York City.

Hansberry’s books, in addition to the two published plays, include: To Be Young, Gifted and Black; The Movement: Documentary of a Struggle for Equality; and Les Blancs: The Collected Last Plays of Lorraine Hansberry.

FRANCES E. W. HARPER (1825–1911) Writer, Poet, Activist

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the first African American woman to publish a short story, was one of the most prolific African American women writers of the nineteenth century. She was known also for essays, poetry, and for her single novel, Iola Leroy. Beyond her writings, Harper was an effective traveling lecturer and a supporter of emancipation, the temperance movement, and of the African American women’s movement.

Harper was born to free parents in 1825 in Baltimore, Maryland, on September 24, 1825. She was never able to reconcile the death of her mother, a traumatic experience that occurred when Harper was only three years old. She was raised by relatives and attended William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth—a prestigious school in Baltimore that her uncle founded. Uncomfortable in the slave city of Baltimore, Harper moved to Ohio in 1850 and became the first woman teacher at the newly founded Union Seminary, later a part of Wilberforce University. In 1854, she became a permanent lecturer for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society and spoke throughout New England, Ohio, New York, and elsewhere. “The bronze muse,” as she became known, gave fiery speeches and often incorporated her poetry into her lectures. So successful and stirring were her presentations that the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society hired her as a lecturer as well. She held her audiences spellbound and spoke with dignity and composure. Although she wrote and lectured on other topics, her attention to anti-slavery caused scholars to refer to her as an abolitionist poet.

Harper’s first volume of poems and prose was published in 1851 as Forest Leaves,alsoprintedas Autumn Leaves. Her literary career was actually launched in 1854 when she published Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects; the work was printed in Boston and Philadelphia and reissued in 1857, 1858, 1864, and 1871. Included in the work were several anti-slavery poems such as “The Slave Mother” and “The Slave Auction,” yet most of the poems dealt with women’s rights, temperance, religion, and other current issues.

Her writings in the Christian Recorder promoted her work as a journalist. Harper’s writings in the journal

included the serialized novel Minnie’s Sacrifice, the dramatic poem “Moses: A Story of the Nile,” a series of poems by “Aunt Chloe,” and the fictionalized essays “Fancy Etchings.” She wrote other serials, but it was not until 1892 that she published in book form her first and best-known work, Iola Leroy, or, Shadows Uplifted. The novel aims to present a true picture of slavery and the Reconstruction, to promote humanity, and to foster a sense of racial pride in African Americans. Her collections of poems that followed included works previously issued but supplemented with other examples of her writings: The Sparrow’s Fall and Other Poems (c.1894); Light Beyond Darkness, The Martyr of Alabama (c.1895); and Atlanta Offering: Poems (1895). In 1900, she published Poems and, the following year, Idylls of the Bible.

Harper’s activities also included work with the YMCA, for which she helped develop Sunday schools; the Colored Section of the Philadelphia and Pennsylvania Women’s Christian Temperance Union; and the American Women’s Suffrage Association. She helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. Harper died in Philadelphia on February 20, 1911.

ROBERT E. HAYDEN (1913–1980) Poet

Robert E. Hayden was born Asa Bundy Sheffey on August 4, 1913, in Detroit, Michigan, to a poor family. His parents left him to be raised by foster parents. Extremely nearsighted, he turned to books rather than sports activities in his childhood.

A graduate of Detroit City College, now Wayne State University, Hayden was chief researcher on African American history and folklore for the Federal Writers Project in 1936. He went on to do advanced work in English, play production, and creative writing at the University of Michigan. While there, he twice won the Jule and Avery Hopwood Prize for poetry. Hayden also completed radio scripts and a finished version of a play about the Underground Railroad, Go Down Moses.

Hayden’s first book of poems, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published in 1940 shortly before he assumed the music and drama critic function for the Michigan Chronicle. He taught at Fisk University from 1946 to the early 1970s and later at the University of Michigan.

His works include: The Lion and the Archer (with Myron O’Higgins); A Ballad of Remembrance; Selected Poems; Words in the Mourning Time; and The Night-Blooming Cereus. He edited Kaleidoscope: Poems by American Negro Poets and Afro American Literature: An Introduction (with David J. Burrows and Frederick R. Lapsides). His other books include: Figure of Time; Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems; and American Journal (poems).

In 1975, the Academy of American Poets elected him its fellow of the year, and in 1976, he was awarded the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. From 1976 to 1978, he was appointed Consultant in Poetry—later known as Poet Laureate—at the Library of Congress. He was the first African American named to receive this appointment. Hayden was a professor of English at the University of Michigan at the time of his death on February 25, 1980.

ESSEX HEMPHILL (1957–1995) Poet, Essayist, Editor, Gay Rights Activist

Essex Hemphill was born in 1957 in Chicago, but spent parts of his childhood in Indiana, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C., and began writing at the age of 14. After attending the University of Maryland and the University of the District of Columbia, Hemphill began to explore the inner conflicts—loneliness, isolation, denial—as well as the homophobia he experienced as a gay African American male by writing poetry. For several years, Hemphill was a contributor of verse to such journals as Essence, Black Scholar, and Obsidian. In the late 1980s, he became involved with a project begun by Joseph Beam, an anthology of gay African American poetry called In the Life. Hemphill was a contributor to the 1986 volume and took the editorship of its sequel after Beam died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1988. The work was published as Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men in 1991.

Hemphill became involved in several film projects around this time as well, nearly all of them controversial in some way, which coincided with his aim to make the two communities, the African American and the gay American, enter into a new, more contemporary dialogue with one another. He wrote verse for Looking for Lang-ston, a British film that addressed the sexuality of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes and brought down the ire of the executor of the Hughes estate, and also contributed to and appeared in Tongues Untied. This last project, Marlon Riggs’s celebratory look at gay African American male culture, was deemed too spicy even for public television at one point.

In 1992, Hemphill saw another book of his own verse published, Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry. During the early part of the decade, he became involved in a project interviewing elderly members of the African American gay community in order to provide a glimpse into a period before either gay or civil rights were mentioned. He also contributed to the book Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS. Hemphill died of AIDS complications on November 4, 1995, at the age of 38.

CHESTER HIMES (1909–1984) Novelist

Born to a middle-class family in Jefferson City, Missouri, on June 29, 1909, Chester Himes was educated at Ohio State University and later lived in France and Spain. In 1945, he completed his first novel, If He Hollers Let Him Go, the story of an African American working in a defense plant. His second book, The Lonely Crusade (1947), was set in similar surroundings. His other books included: The Third Generation; Cotton Comes to Harlem; Pinktoes; The Quality of Hurt: The Autobiography of Chester Himes; and Black on Black: Baby Sister and Selected Writings.

Although his talent went relatively unnoticed in the United States, Himes’ series of detective novels were later compared with those of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and the African American writer, Walter Mosley. Following a stroke that confined him to a wheelchair, Himes and his wife lived in Alicante, Spain. In 1977, they returned to New York City for the publication of the concluding volume of his autobiography, My Life of Absurdity. Himes died of Parkinson’s disease in Spain on November 12, 1984, at the age of 75. Himes was a prolific author of almost 20 books, and several of his popular novels have been reprinted posthumously in hardcover and paperback editions.

PAULINE E. HOPKINS (1859–1930) Writer, Editor, Playwright, Singer, Actress

Although her contemporaries gave her less recognition than modern scholars, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins became known for promoting racial issues in her short stories, novels, and in her work as editor of the journal, The Colored American. She is sometimes referred to as the “Dean of African American women writers.”

Born in Portland, Maine, in 1859, Hopkins moved to Boston when she was still a child and graduated from Girls High School. At age 15, she entered a writing contest supported by writer William Wells Brown and sponsored by the Congregational Publishing Society in Boston and won a 10-dollar prize for her essay “The Evils of Intemperance and Their Remedies.”

Hopkins established the theater troupe, the Colored Troubadours, and performed with the group for 12 years. On July 5, 1880, in Boston, the Troubadours performed her first play, Slaves’ Escape: or the Underground Railroad, also known as Peculiar Sam, which Hopkins had completed a year earlier. During her tenure with the group, she also wrote the play, One Scene from the Drama of Early Days.

Hopkins helped to establish The Colored American; its first issue in May, 1900, published her short story “The Mystery Within Us.” Later, the magazine published Hopkins’s series of biographical sketches “Famous Women of the Negro Race” and “Famous Men of the Negro Race.” About this time the magazine published serialized versions of three of her novels: Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice (1901–1902); Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest (1902); and Of One Blood: or The Hidden Self (1902– 1903). Her first novel, however, Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, was published by a Boston firm in 1900. She resigned from The Colored American in 1904.

In 1905, Hopkins wrote briefly for Voice of the Negro; after that, her literary career began to decline. She founded her own publishing company, the P. E. Hopkins and Company, and in February and March, 1916, contributed two articles to New Era Magazine. She lived in obscurity after 1916 and died on August 13, 1930, as a result of severe burns.

GEORGE MOSES HORTON (1797?–1883?) Poet

George Moses Horton was the first African American professional man of letters in the United States and one of the first professional writers of any race in the South. He was the first African American southerner to have a volume of poetry published.

Horton was born into slavery in North Carolina around 1797. While growing up on a farm, he cultivated a love of learning. With the aid of his mother and her Wesley hymnal, Horton learned to read, although he did not learn to write until years later. While working as a janitor at the University of North Carolina, Horton wrote light verse for some students in exchange for spending money.

Some of Horton’s early poems were printed in the newspapers of Raleigh and Boston. When Horton published his first book of poems in 1829, he entitled it The Hope of Liberty, in the belief that profits from its sales would be sufficient to pay for his freedom. His hopes did not materialize, however, and he remained a slave until the Emancipation Proclamation (this book was reprinted in 1837 under the title Poems by a Slave). In 1865, he published “Naked Genius,” a poem containing many bitter lines about his former condition that were in sharp contrast to the conformist verse of earlier African American poets. Although he lived in Philadelphia for a while, it appears that he returned to the South, where he died around 1883. Richard Walser’s, The Black Poet, was written about Horton and published in 1967.

LANGSTON HUGHES (1902–1967) Poet, Novelist, Playwright

Born in Joplin, Missouri, on February 1, 1902, James Mercer Langston Hughes moved to Cleveland at the age of 14, and graduated from Central High School. His love of books developed at young age. After his parents separated, then divorced, he was raised primarily by his grandmother, Mary Langston, who inspired in him a feeling of racial pride. Langston’s unstable childhood was to have a major impact on the poetry he later wrote.

Hughes spent a year in Mexico before studying engineering—at his father’s request—at Columbia University. After roaming the world as a seaman and writing some poetry as well, Hughes returned to the United States. While attending Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, he won the Witter Bynner Prize for undergraduate poetry. In 1930, he received the Harmon Award, and in 1935, with the help of a Guggenheim Fellowship, traveled to Russia and Spain.

The long and distinguished list of Hughes’s prose works includes: Not Without Laughter (1930); The Big Sea (1940); and I Wonder as I Wander (1956), his autobiography. To this must be added such collections of poetry as The Weary Blues (1926); The Dream Keeper (1932); Shakespeare in Harlem (1942); Fields of Wonder (1947); One Way Ticket (1949); Selected Poems (1959); and the posthumously published The Panther and the Lash: Poems of Our Times (1969).

Although Hughes had a great influence on the Harlem Renaissance, he criticized those writers who embraced eurocentric values and culture.

Hughes was also an accomplished song lyricist, librettist, and newspaper columnist. Through his newspaper columns, he created Jesse B. Semple, a Harlem character known as Simple. Simple is the quintessential “wise fool” whose experiences and insights capture the frustrations felt by African Americans. Hughes’s Simple sketches have been collected in several volumes and were adapted for the musical stage in Simply Heavenly.

Through much of the 1960s, Hughes edited several anthologies in an attempt to popularize African American authors and their works. Some of these works are An African Treasury (1960), Poems from Black Africa (1963), New Negro Poets: U.S.A. (1964), and The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers (1967). Published posthumously was Good Morning Revolution: Uncollected Writings of Social Protest. Hughes wrote many plays, including Emperor of Haiti and Mulatto, which was produced on Broadway in the 1930s. He also wrote gospel music plays, such as Tambourines to Glory Black Nativity and Jericho—Jim Crow. Hughes gained an international reputation in the 1950s and 1960s. He died of complications related to abdominal surgery for prostate cancer on May 22, 1967.

ZORA NEALE HURSTON (1903–1960) Novelist, Folklorist

Zora Neale Hurston was born on January 7, 1903, in Eatonville, Florida. After traveling north as a maid with a Gilbert and Sullivan company, Hurston acquired her education at Morgan State College, Howard University, and Columbia University. While at Howard under Alain Locke’s influence, she became a figure in the Harlem Renaissance, publishing short stories in Opportunity and serving with Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman on the editorial board of the magazine Fire!

In 1934, Jonah’s Gourd Vine was published after her return to Florida. Her most important novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was adapted into a film by Oprah Winfrey in 2005, appeared three years later. Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) was followed in 1948 by Seraph on the Suwanee. Her other three works are two books of folklore, Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), and Dust Tracks on a Road (1942).

Toward the end of her life, Hurston was a drama instructor at the North Carolina College for Negroes in Durham (now North Carolina Central University). She died in obscurity and poverty on January 28, 1960. In 1973, Alice Walker, African American novelist and scholar, found and marked Hurston’s grave and rekindled interest in her life and work. Since then, six of her works, including her autobiography with several chapters were restored, have been reprinted with new introductions. Hurston is celebrated each year in Eatonville, Florida, where the Zora Neale Hurston Festival is held.

CHARLES R. JOHNSON (1948– ) Novelist, Essayist, Cartoonist

Charles Johnson, only the second African American man to win the National Book Award (Ralph Ellison was the first), was born on April 23, 1948, in Evanston, Illinois. He began his career as a political cartoonist in the early 1970s; his work led to a television series on cartooning on PBS. During the same time period, he was heavily involved in organizations that supported the formation of African American studies as a discipline.

Johnson’s development as a novelist took shape while receiving his B.A. in 1971 from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and subsequently, his M.A. in philosophy in 1973. Out of these experiences, Johnson developed situations in his books that dealt with philosophical discussions about race, identity, and culture.

Johnson’s literary works include both novels and short stories, beginning with Faith and the Good Thing (1974); Oxherding Tale (1982); The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (short stories 1986); Middle Passage (1990), which received the National Book Award that year; and Dreamer (1998). He has also ventured into non-fiction with Africans in America (1998) and its companion, Soulcatcher and Other Stories. In 2003, he published a collection of essays on his experiences as an African American Buddhist in Turning the Wheel.

Johnson is the S. Wilson and Grace M. Pollock Endowed Professor of English at the University of Washington and has been the recipient of fellowships from the MacArthur Foundation and the Guggenheim Foundation.

GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON (1886–1966) Poet, Playwright

As one of the first modern African American women poets to gain recognition, and sometimes referred to as the most famous woman poet of the Harlem Renaissance, Georgia Douglas Johnson, whose collections of verse were published between 1918 and 1930, is an important link in the chain of African American women lyric poets. Johnson’s life spanned most of the literary movements of this century, and her Washington, D.C., home was the popular gathering place for early Harlem Renaissance writers. After her husband’s death in 1925, she supported herself and her two sons with a series of temporary jobs and created her own supportive environment by hosting Saturday night open houses that became one of the greatest literary salons of the period. Johnson was born in Atlanta, Georgia, on September 10, 1886. She was educated in the public schools of the city and at Atlanta University, and she went on to attend Howard University in Washington, D.C., and Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio.

Initially, she was interested in musical composition, but gradually Johnson turned to lyric poetry. After teaching school in Alabama, she moved to Washington, D.C., with her husband, who had been appointed as recorder of deeds by President William Howard Taft. While in the nation’s capital, she too engaged in government work while completing such books as The Heart of a Woman (1918), Bronze (1922), An Autumn Love Cycle (1928), and Share My World, published in 1962. Johnson was a prolific writer; over 200 of her poems were published in her four literary works; other poems and several dramas have appeared in journals and books, primarily edited by African Americans. She also wrote many plays in the 1920s, but most of the manuscripts did not survive. She died of a stroke on May 14, 1966.

JAMES WELDON JOHNSON (1871–1938) Poet, Lyricist, Civil Rights Leader

Similar to W.E.B. Du Bois, African American intellectual James Weldon Johnson played a vital role in the civil rights movement of the twentieth century as poet, teacher, critic, diplomat, and NAACP official. He was also an important figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Johnson is perhaps most often remembered as the lyricist for “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” the song that is often referred to as the African American national anthem.

Born on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, Johnson was educated at Atlanta and Columbia Universities. His career included service as a school principal, a lawyer, and a diplomat (U.S. consul at Puerto Cabello, Venezuela, and later in Nicaragua). From 1916 to 1930, he was a key policymaker of the NAACP, eventually serving as the organization’s executive secretary. From 1932 until his death, he was professor of creative writing at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

In his early days, Johnson’s fame rested largely on his lyrics for popular songs, but in 1917 he completed his first book of poetry, Fifty Years and Other Poems. Five years later, he followed this work with The Book of American Negro Poetry, and in 1927, he established his literary reputation with God’s Trombones, a collection of seven folk sermons in verse. Over the years, this work has been performed countless times on stage and television.

In 1930, Johnson finished St. Peter Relates an Incident of the Resurrection, and three years later, his lengthy autobiography, Along This Way appeared. Johnson died on June 26, 1938, following an automobile accident in Maine.

GAYL JONES (1949– ) Novelist, Poet, Short Story Writer, Educator

Born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1949, Gayl Jones received a bachelor’s degree in English from Connecticut College in 1971, a master’s degree in creative writing from Brown University in 1973, and a doctorate in creative writing in 1975. From 1975 to 1981, she was professor of English at the University of Michigan. Jones’s work includes four novels: Corregidora (1975); Eva’s Man (1976); Healing (1998), which was a finalist for the National Book Award; and Mosquito (1999); short stories; and several collections of poetry, including Song for Anninho (1981); The Hermit Woman (1983); Xarque and Other Poems (1985); and Liberating Voices (1991), her first book of literary criticism. Although sometimes considered controversial in its subject matter—particularly Eva’s Man, which deals with the sexual molestation and violence done to African American girls by African American men—Jones’ work is both multilayered and complex.

After the release of Healing in 1998, Jones’s husband Bob Jones had an encounter with the police in Kentucky that resulted in his suicide. This traumatic event caused Jones to step out of the limelight of the literary world and to seek professional therapy for depression.

JUNE JORDAN (1936–2002) Poet, Novelist

Born in Harlem, New York, on July 9, 1936, poet, novelist, essayist, educator, and activist June Jordan attended Barnard College and the University of Chicago. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, she taught Afro-American literature, English, and writing at several colleges and universities including CUNY, Connecticut College, Sarah Lawrence College, Yale University, and State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she spent most of her career as director of the poetry center and creative writing program. She left State University in 1989 to teach Afro-American studies and women’s studies at the University of California at Berkley. Jordan co-founded and co-directed The Voice of the Children, Inc., a creative workshop.

A prolific writer, Jordan’s poems have been published in many magazines, newspapers, and anthologies, and she received a Rockefeller Grant in creative writing in 1969. Her poetry includes: Who Look at Me (1969); Some Changes (1971); New Days: Poems of Exile and Return (1974); Passion: New Poems, 1977–1980 (1980); Living Room: New Poems (1985); Lyrical Campaigns: Selected Poems (1989); and Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989). Jordan’s books for children and young people include: His Own Where (1971), nominated for the National Book Award; Fannie Lou Hamer (1972); DryVictories (1972); and Kimako’s Story (1981). Basic Books published her memoir, Soldier: A Poet’s Childhood,in 2000.

Author of two plays, Jordan also published essays, including: “Civil Wars” (1981); “On Call: Political Essays” (1985); “Moving Towards Home: Political Essays” (1989); and “Technical Difficulties: African American Notes on the State of the Union” (1992). In addition, she edited several anthologies, such as Soulscript: Afro-American Poetry (1970).

In 2001, Jordan received a Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from the Poets & Writers organization. The award recognized Jordan’s Poetry for the People project, which offers poetry workshops to underserved communities. Jordon passed away, on June 14, 2002, at her home in Berkeley, California, of breast cancer. She was 65.

ADRIENNE KENNEDY (1931– ) Writer, Playwright

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1931, Adrienne Lita Hawkins grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. She received a B.A. in education from Ohio State in 1953, and married Joseph C. Kennedy one month later. In 1955, they moved to New York, and she studied writing at the American Theatre Wing and at Columbia University, completing her first play, Pale Blue Flowers, which was never produced or published.

In 1960, Kennedy and her husband traveled to Europe and then Ghana on a grant from the Africa Research Foundation. Her writing became more focused, and she published a story in Black Orpheus magazine. At the age of 29, Kennedy wrote Funnyhouse of a Negro, a one-act play. Edward Albee selected and co-directed the play for production in New York’s Circle in the Square. It ran from January 14 to February 9, 1964 at the East End Theatre in New York.

Kennedy’s next play, The Owl Answers, produced in 1965, won her a second Stanley Award from Wagner College of Staten Island, New York. Since the mid-1960s, she has written many full-length and one-act plays, including Sun: A Poem for Malcolm X Inspired by His Murder (1968), A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White (1976), Black Children’s Day (1980), and Diary of Lights (1987). Later, the University of Minnesota Press published collections of her work, including The Alexander Plays (1992). In 1996, her latest plays, Sleep Deprivation Chamber, and June and Jean in Concert, were produced at the Joseph Papp Public Theater and the Susan Stein Shiva Theater, respectively. Kennedy wrote an autobiography that was published in 1987 and titled People Who Led to My Plays.

Kennedy’s plays are hallmarks of the American experimental theater, avant-garde and non-traditional in the extreme. She has won many awards for her bold and clear vision, including several Obie Awards and a Pierre Lecomte du Novy Award from the Lincoln Center in 1994. In addition to winning many fellowships and grants, Kennedy has been a lecturer at several universities including Yale, Princeton, Brown, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley. She also served as an International Theatre Institute representative in Budapest in 1978.

Recently, Kennedy adapted the Greek tragedy Oedipus for the acting troop the Hartford Footlights. She has also published a collection of all of work appropriately called The Adrienne Kennedy Reader in 2001.

JOHN O.KILLENS (1916–1987) Novelist, Essayist, Screenwriter

John Oliver Killens was born in Macon, Georgia, on January 14, 1916; he was the son of Charles Myles Sr. and Willie Lee Killens. He attended Edward Waters College, Morris Brown College, Atlanta University, Howard University, Robert H. Terrell Law School, Columbia University, and New York University, and he was a member of the United States Army’s South Pacific Amphibian Forces from 1942 to 1945.

Killens attributed his writing career to his paternal great-grandmother who was seven years old when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. During his childhood, the elderly woman told Killens stories about the past. Sometimes when she finished talking about days gone by, she would tell him, “The half ain’t never been told!” Although his original career plans to become a doctor were abandoned when he decided to study law, Killens ultimately accepted his ancestor’s challenge to tell parts of the untold half and became a writer.

He was a co-founder and first chairperson of the Harlem Writers Guild, which provided a forum for writers to read their works. Youngblood (1954), the first book published by a member of the Harlem Writers Guild and Killens’s first novel, is about an African American family’s struggle to survive in the South. Four more novels followed: And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962), which is based on Killens’s encounters with racism in the military during World War II; ’Sippi (1967), which focuses on struggles over voting rights in the 1960s; The Cotillion or One Good Bull Is Half the Herd (1971), which is a satirical interpretation of the black bourgeoisie; and Great Black Russian: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin: A Novel on the Life and Times of Alexander Pushkin (1989), which is the result of Killens’s more than 12 years of research on the life of the poet. In 1968 and 1970, Killens traveled to the Soviet Union where he participated in the Pushkin festivals, conversed with other Pushkin scholars, visited Pushkin’s home, and visited the Pushkin museum. While researching and writing Great Black Russian, Killens lectured to students and literary groups throughout the United States on Pushkin. Killens’s novel was one of the first to consider Pushkin’s African ancestry. Great Black Russian was completed shortly before Killens’s death. Two of the aforementioned novels were nominated for the Pulitzer Prize: And Then We Heard the Thunder, and The Cotillion.

Among Killens’s additional works are Black Man’s Burden (1965), a collection of essays; Great Gittin’ Up Morning: Biography of Denmark Vesey (juvenile literature, 1972); A Man Ain’t Nothin’ But a Man: The Adventures of John Henry (juvenile literature, 1975); and Black Southern Voices: An Anthology of Fiction, Poetry, Drama, Nonfiction, and Critical Essays (1992), a work that was co-edited with Jerry W. Ward Jr. and published after Killens’s death. He also wrote screenplays.

Killens, the recipient of many honors and awards, taught at various institutions including Fisk University, Columbia University, Howard University, Bronx Community College, and Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. On October 27, 1987, Killens died of cancer in Brooklyn, New York.

JAMAICA KINCAID (1949– ) Writer

Jamaica Kincaid was born Elaine Potter Richardson on May 25, 1949, in St. Johns, Antigua. After leaving Antigua at 16 years of age, she entered the United States as Jamaica Kincaid and moved to New York. Kincaid held several positions while seeking her niche in the United States. Her writing career began as a contributor to the New Yorker magazine. Once a staff member, Kincaid had her collection of stories and other short pieces, which mainly ran in the magazine from 1974 to 1976, published under the title At the Bottom of the River (1983), which was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner Award.

It was four years before Kincaid published her first work of fiction, Annie John (1985). This work was later followed by A Small Place (1988), Annie Gwenn Lilly Pam & Tulip (1989), Lucy (1990), My Brother (1997), Talk Stories (2000), My Garden (2001), and Mr. Potter (2002).

With her lyrical style and semi-autobiographical focus, Kincaid addresses themes about lasting scars from childhood experiences, ambivalence toward parents, the mother-daughter relationship, and the search for identity.

YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA (1947– ) Poet, Educator

Yusef Komunyakaa was born James Willie Brown Jr. in 1947, in the segregated, culturally desolate mill town of Bogalusa, Louisiana. He came to love reading and poetry as a child, and at age 16 years of age began pursuing his own talents. After high school graduation, Komunyakaa joined the U.S. Army and was sent to Vietnam to act as a reporter and editor for a military newspaper in 1969.

Although he felt estranged from American society upon his return from Vietnam, Komunyakaa enrolled at the University of Colorado and later graduate school at Colorado State University. He received a second master’s degree from the University of California at Irvine. A creative writing workshop proved inspirational, and his first book of poetry, Dedication and Other Darkhorses, was published in 1977. With the release of his second volume two years later, Komunyakaa accepted a series of fellowships and teaching positions, enabling him to pursue a career as a poet.

While working in New Orleans in 1983, Komunyakaa began to come to terms with his experiences in Vietnam through his writing. This challenge resulted in several sophisticated books filled with cultural influences that portray basic elements of humanity. In 1985, the poet left New Orleans to accept a position as a visiting professor at Indiana University in Bloomington. By 1987, having published two more books of poetry, Komunyakaa became an associate professor in the Afro-American and English studies departments at the university. For personal and religious reasons, the poet changed his name from James Willie Brown Jr. to Yusef Komunyakaa.

With the publication of Neon Vernacular, he was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in poetry along with the $50,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award given by the Claremont Graduate School. Komunyakaa’s themes of memory and self-definition—as an African American man and a veteran of Vietnam—lend his works a sense of strength and spiritual tenacity.

Komunyakaa’s collections of poetry include Talking Dirty to the Gods (2000), Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems (2001), and Taboo (2004). He also published Gilgamesh (2006), a verse play and first dramatic adaptation of the Epic of Gilgamesh. In 2001, Komunyakaa was awarded the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. This award, which includes a cash prize of $100,000, is for lifetime achievement by a United States poet.

NELLA LARSEN (1891–1964) Novelist, Librarian, Nurse

Nella Larsen was born in 1891 in Chicago, Illinois, of a Danish mother and a West Indian father. She attended Fisk University’s Normal (High) School in Nashville, Tennessee, and from 1909 to 1912, the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Three years later, she graduated from the Lincoln School for Nurses in New York City. In addition to her writing, she worked alternately as a nurse and librarian, having attended the New York Public Library training school from 1921 to 1923. After one year as head nurse at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University), she became supervising nurse at the Lincoln Hospital in New York City until 1918, when she joined the city’s department of health. During the next 40 years, she worked as a children’s librarian at the New York Public Library (1924–1926), Gouverneur Hospital (1944–1961), and the Metropolitan Hospital (1961– 1964), all in New York City. Writing, however, is what made her famous.

In the 1920s, Larsen began contributing to children’s magazines. At the same time, she found herself immersed in the literary and political activities of the ongoing Harlem Renaissance. Larsen’s first novel, Quicksand (1928), received a bronze medal from the Harmon Foundation. The groundbreaking novel developed themes around African American women’s sexuality and about mixed racial identity. Her second major work, Passing (1929), led to her becoming the first African American woman to be awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing (1930). More than 30 years after her death on March 20, 1964, Larsen’s novels were reissued, and she finally achieved recognition as one of the most important writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

JULIUS LESTER (1939– ) Writer, Educator

Julius Lester was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1939. He grew up in Kansas City, Kansas, and Nashville, Tennessee, where his father led congregations as a Methodist minister. Lester spent the summers of his youth in rural Arkansas, experiencing racism and segregation firsthand. A gifted student, he was an avid musician and aspired to become a writer.

Lester obtained a B.A. in English from Fisk University. He became politically active in the civil rights struggle as a folksinger and photographer of Southern rallies. As a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the mid-1960s, Lester became head of its photo department and visited North Vietnam to document the effects of U.S. bombing missions. He began publishing ideological books that defended African American militancy including The Angry Children of Malcolm X and Revolutionary Notes. From 1966 to 1968, Lester served as director of the prestigious Newport Folk Festival and released two record albums himself.

Having achieved fame for his artistic pursuits, Lester was hired to host live radio shows at the public broadcasting station WBAI-FM in New York City. Around the same time, he published two books for children that saw immediate success. Black Folktales compiled African legends and slave narratives, and To Be a Slave, a collection of stories based on oral history accounts, received a Newbery Honor Book citation. In 1971, Lester began hosting the New York public television program “Free Time.” His career as an award-winning academician began that same year, when he was hired as professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. He settled there in 1975 and became a full-time professor and author.

Lester flourished as an author by releasing novels and storybooks (with illustrator Jerry Pinkney) that reflected his interests in African American history, folklore, and politics. Long Journey Home, a finalist for the National Book Award, explores the everyday lives of African Americans during the Reconstruction period. Lester’s Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit, traditional stories retold in a contemporary southern African American voice, were well-received by teachers and librarians who granted it the Coretta Scott King Award. His 1994 adult novel, And All Our Wounds Forgiven, tracks dramatic events in the 1960s. Lester’s individualism and resistance to racial and religious categorization is evident in two autobiographies: All Is Well, and Lovesong: Becoming a Jew.

In the second half of the 1990s, Lester flipped back and forth between tales for children and more adult works. His younger audience enjoyed titles such as Black Cowboy, Wild Horses: a True Story (1998); Albidaro and the Mischievous Dream (2000); and Ackmarackus: Julius Lester’s Sumptuously Silly Fantastically Funny Fables (2001). More mature audiences were treated to a more historical view of slavery with From Slave Ship to Freedom Road (1997) and a dark trip into the psychosis of two young children in When Dad Killed Mom (2001). Lester published a racially repositioned novelization of Othello for young adults in 1995 called Othello: A Novel.

Lester subsequently published The Autobiography of God (novel, 2004); Day of Tears (novel, 2005); On Writers for Children and Other People (literary memoir, 2005); Time’s Memory (2006); and Cupid (2007). In 2006, he won the Coretta Scott King Award for his novel, Day of Tears.

When he converted to Judaism in mid-life, Lester was ousted from Amherst’s renamed African American Studies Department in 1988. Persevering through yet another career change, he moved to the university’s Near Eastern and Judaic Studies Department and also taught in the history and English departments; he retired from the University of Massachusetts in 2003.

AUDRE LORDE (1934–1992) Poet, Novelist, Essayist

Audre Lorde was born in New York City’s Harlem on February 18, 1924. Her parents were immigrants from Granada. Lorde began writing poetry at the age of 12. She received a bachelor’s degree in literature and philosophy from Hunter College in 1959 and a master’s degree in library science from Columbia University in 1960. In 1962, she married Edward Rollins, an attorney, and had two children. The couple divorced in 1970. She was poet-in-residence at Tougaloo College; taught at Lehman College, Bronx; and taught at John Jay College and CCNY. She received a National Endowment for the Arts grant and a Cultural Council Foundation grant for poetry. She attempted to join the Harlem Writers Guild, but was disappointed by what she felt perceived as the group’s overt homophobia and left.

Her books of poetry included: Cables to Rage (1970); The First Cities (1968); From a Land Where Other People Live (1973), which was nominated for a National Book Award; Coal (1968); The New York Head Shop and Museum (1974); Between Ourselves (1976); The Black Unicorn (1978); Chosen Poems—Old and New (1982); Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982); Sister/Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984); Lesbian Poetry: An Anthology (1982); and Woman Poet—The East (1984). Lorde’s poetry has been published in many anthologies, magazines, and lesbian books and periodicals.

Six months after her mastectomy in 1978 for breast cancer, Lorde began documenting her battle with the disease in journal entries that later became The Cancer Journal (1980). Lorde gained critical and popular acclaim for her moving and honest portrayal of life with the disease. Lorde lived for 14 years after her diagnosis, but eventually succumbed to cancer on November 17, 1992.

CLAUDE MCKAY (1890–1948) Poet, Novelist

Born the son of a farmer in Jamaica (then British West Indies) on September 15, 1890, Festus Claudius McKay was the youngest of 11 children. He began writing early in life. Two books of his poems, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads, were published just after he turned 20 years of age. In both, he made extensive use of Jamaican dialect.

In 1913, Claude McKay came to the United States to study agriculture at Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) and at Kansas State University, but his interest in poetry induced him to move to New York City, where he published his work in small literary magazines. McKay then made a trip to England. While there, he completed a collection of lyrics entitled Spring in New Hampshire. When he returned to the United States, he became associate editor of The Liberator under Max Eastman. In 1922, he completed Harlem Shadows, a landmark work of the Harlem Renaissance period.

McKay then turned to the writing of such novels as Home to Harlem (1928), Banjo (1929), and four other books, including an autobiography and a study of Harlem. The Passion of Claude McKay: Selected Prose and Poetry 1912–1948, edited by Wayne Cooper, was published in 1973. McKay traveled abroad before returning to the United States, where he died on May 22, 1948. His final work, Selected Poems, was published posthumously in 1953.

During World War II, when Winston Churchill addressed a joint session of the United States Congress in

an effort to enlist American aid in the battle against Nazism, the climax of his oration was his reading of the famous poem “If We Must Die,” originally written by McKay to assail lynchings and mob violence in the South. McKay’s Trial by Lynching (1967), edited and translated stories, and his The Negroes in America (1979 or 1980), edited and translated from the Russian language, have also been published. Many of his works have been reprinted since his death, including: Home to Harlem; Banana Bottom; Banjo (1970); A Long Way From Home (1970); Harlem: Negro Metropolis (1972); and Selected Poems of Claude McKay (1971). Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads have been bound together as The Dialect Poems of Claude McKay. Wayne F. Cooper’s Claude McKay: Rebel Sojourner in the Harlem Renaissance (1987) is an important book detailing McKay’s life and work.

NELLIE Y. MCKAY (c.1940s–2006) Literary Critic

Nellie Yvonne McKay, the daughter of West Jamaican parents Harry and Nellie McKay, was born in Harlem in the 1940s. She received three degrees in English and American Literature: a B.A. (cum laude with honors) from Queens College, CUNY in 1969; a M.A. from Harvard University in 1971; and a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1977.

McKay knew how to read before she began her formal education. During her childhood, she decided she wanted to teach. Until two college professors encouraged McKay to teach on the college level, she had planned to become a kindergarten teacher. McKay taught at Simmons College in the 1970s before joining the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1978. Her joint appointment to teach in the African American Studies and English Department was expanded to allow McKay to teach in the Women’s Studies Department as well. The departments of African American Studies and Women’s Studies were floundering until McKay’s arrival. Since then, McKay, who was one of the most preeminent scholars and literary critics in the United States, made significant contributions to the departments. Consequently, the University of Wisconsin-Madison has enjoyed national attention in both areas. McKay declined numerous offers to leave UW-M, including an offer from Harvard, her alma mater.

McKay specialized in nineteenth and twentieth-century African American literature with an emphasis on fiction, autobiography, and black women’s writings. Her first book was her doctoral thesis, Jean Toomer-the Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936 (1984). McKay’s other books include Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1988); The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), co-edited with Henry Louis Gates Jr.; Approaches to Teaching the Novels of Toni Morrison (1997); co-edited with Kathryn Earl; Beloved: A Casebook (1998), co-edited with William L. Andrews; and the Norton Critical Edition of Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (2000), co-edited with Frances Smith Foster. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature is McKay’s most prominent publication; McKay and Gates were the general editors, and along with nine other African American literary scholars, they created the definitive anthology of African American literature. It presents the works of 120 authors, including 52 women, from 1746 to the present, and 13 major works are reprinted in their entirety. Cornel West hailed The Norton Anthology of African American Literature as “a classic of splendid proportions” while Letty Cottin Pogrebin pointed out, “With the publication of this extraordinary collection, no one can ever again claim ignorance of the rich, rewarding legacy of the African-American literary tradition—and especially of Black women’s pre-eminent contribution to this heritage.” In addition to her full-length publications, McKay wrote essays for literary journals and other books. She also wrote various introductions and afterwards to new and recently reprinted books in African American and women’s writings.

McKay received a variety of honors and awards during her career, including the Vilas Associate Award,

UW-M, 1987–1989; Chancellor’s Distinguished Teaching Award, UW-M, 1992; MELUS Award for Contributions to Multi-Ethnic Literatures, 1996; and Honorary Membership in UW-Madison Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, 1999. McKay died of colon cancer on January 22, 2006, and was thought to be in her mid-70s.

TERRY MCMILLAN (1951– ) Novelist

Terry McMillan was born on October 18, 1951, and raised in Port Huron, Michigan. She attended Los Angeles City College, but later transferred to Berkeley and then to Columbia University to study film. She later enrolled in a writing workshop at the Harlem Writers Guild and was accepted at the MacDowell Colony in 1983. She has taught at the University of Wyoming and the University of Arizona.

McMillan published her first short story when she was 25 years old. Her subsequent novels include Mama (1987), Disappearing Acts (1989), and Waiting to Exhale (1992). She also edited the anthology of contemporary African American fiction entitled Breaking Ice: An Anthology of Contemporary African-American Fiction (1992). In 1997, she published How Stella Got Her Groove Back, and in 2000, A Day Late and a Dollar Short hit the stands. In 2005, she published the novel, The Interruption of Everything.

Waiting to Exhale hit the New York Times’ bestseller list within one week of being in print and remained there for several months. Hardcover publisher Viking printed 700,000 copies and Pocket Books, which published the paperback version, paid $2.64 million for the rights to the work. In 1995, the novel was adapted into one of the most highly touted films of the year. Directed by Forest Whitaker, the film version starred Angela Bassett, Whitney Houston, Lela Rochon, and Loretta Devine. Wesley Snipes and Gregory Hines had smaller roles. How Stella Got Her Groove Back was also made into a popular film, and Disappearing Acts was brought to the small screen.

In 1993, New York Women in Communication gave McMillan a Matrix Award. In 1994, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund honored McMillan at a luncheon.

McMillan received much publicity in 2005 during her acrimonious divorce from Jonathan Plummer, a Jamaican man 24 years her junior—and the subject of her fictionalized bestseller, How Stella Got Her Groove Back. McMillan claimed she was defrauded by Plummer when he lied about his sexual orientation.

JAMES ALAN MCPHERSON (1943– ) Short Story Writer

James McPherson, born in Savannah, Georgia, on October 16, 1943, received his B.A. degree in 1965 from Morris Brown College in Atlanta, a law degree from Harvard University in 1968, and an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa in 1969.

He has taught writing at several universities, including the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where he taught fiction writing. At the present time, he teaches writing at the University of Iowa and is a contributing editor of Atlantic Monthly.

His short stories have appeared in several magazines. Hue and Cry, a collection of short stories published in 1969, was highly praised by Ralph Ellison. Named a Guggenheim fellow in 1972 and 1973, McPherson’s second book of short stories, Elbow Room, was published in 1977 and received the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in the following year. McPherson was one of the three African American writers who were awarded five-year grants by the McArthur Foundation of Chicago for exceptional talent in 1981. For 20 years, McPherson taught and put no new literature on the market. Then in 1997, he published the memoir, Crabcakes. He followed this up in 2000 with a collection of personal essays and reviews in A Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile.

HAKI MADHUBUTI (DON L. LEE) (1942– ) Poet, Essayist, Publisher

Haki Madhubuti exemplifies the attempt of a person to create a unified self and live a holistic life—not one that is fragmented by the poet, educator, and journalist that Madhubuti has become.

Born Don L. Lee on February 23, 1942, in Little Rock, Arkansas, Madhubuti and his family moved to Detroit a year later. After his father left home and his mother died, he moved to Chicago at age 16 to live with an aunt. He graduated from Chicago City College with an A.A. degree and later received an M.F.A. degree from the University of Iowa.

From 1961 to 1966, Madhubuti prepared to become a writer: he read a book daily and wrote a 200-word review of each book. He published his first volume of poetry, Think Black, in 1966. In 1967, he joined Johari Amini (Jewel Latimore) and Carolyn Rogers in launching the Third World Press; it became the longest continuously operated African American press in the United States. His other works of poetry published in the 1960s were Black Pride (1968) and Don’t Cry, Scream (1969). Later, he taught and served as a writer-in-residence at numerous universities including Chicago State, Cornell, Howard, Morgan State, and the University of Illinois.

In the 1970s, he published Directionscore: Selected and New Poems and To Gwen with Love. His Dynamic Voices: Black Poets of the 1960s, published in 1971 by Broadside Press, provided a critical context for writers of the Black Arts movement from one who participated in it. Here the writer defined the role of the African American literary critic and set standards for the critic to follow. The next year he founded Black Books Bulletin.

In 1973, Madhubuti changed his name from Don L. Lee to Haki Madhubuti, which, in Swahili, means “justice,” “awakening,” and “strong.” He moved to Howard University that year where he was poet-in-residence. During the 1980s, he began teaching at Chicago State, where he remains as professor of English. His works from the 1970s into the 1990s include: The Clash of Faces (1978); Say That the River Turns: The Impact of Gwendolyn Brooks (1987); Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (1987); and Black Men: Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?; and African American Families in Transition: Essays in Discovery, Solution, and Hope (1990). He also edited Why L.A. Happened: Implications of the ’92 Los Angeles Rebellion (1993) and Claiming Earth: Race, Rage, Rape, Redemption: Blacks Seeking a Cultural Enlightened Empowerment (1994). Although still a poet, in the 1990s he strengthened his skills as an essayist.

Among his honors, Madhubuti has received the DuSable Museum Award for Excellence in Poetry, National Council of Teachers of English Award, the Sidney R. Yates Advocate Award, and the African Heritage Studies Association citation. Later, he was also honored with the Distinguished Writers Award from the Middle Atlantic Writers Association in 1984 and the American Book Award in 1991. In 1984, he was the only poet selected to represent the United States at the International Valmiki World Poetry Festival held in New Delhi, India.

In addition to his teaching duties, Madhubuti is a director of the National Black Holistic Retreat, which he co-founded in 1984. He also remains as publisher and editor of Third World Press. Third World Press also published Madhubuti’s Heartlove: Wedding and Love Poems in 1998, Tough Notes: Letters to Young Black Men in 2001, and Yellow Black: The First Twenty-One Years of a Poet’s Life in 2005.

PAULE MARSHALL (1929– ) Writer

Paule Marshall was born Valenza Pauline Burke on April 9, 1929, in Brooklyn, New York. Marshall’s parents were emigrants from Barbados, and she grew up in a community with strong West Indian influences. She grew to love poetry from an early age and was inspired by the women’s conversations that often took place around her kitchen table. Although Marshall did some writing in her childhood years, her serious devotion to writing began in 1954 as exercise at the end of her work day. The result was her first short story “The Valley Between.”

Marshall’s work, which centers on people of African descent, sets out to create images that celebrate the human spirit and put asunder all forms of political and social oppression. Her major themes include the search for identity—both personal and cultural—, alienation, and cultural conflict.

Marshall has received numerous awards and fellowships—including a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960—and her novels include: Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959); Soul Clap Hands and Sing (1961); The Chosen Place, the Timeless People (1969); Praisesong for the Widow (1983); Daughters (1991); and The Fisher King (2000). Short stories and essays are also a part of Marshall’s contributions to an African-centered literary experience.

LOFTEN MITCHELL (1919–2001) Playwright

Born on April 15, 1919, in Columbus, North Carolina, and raised in Harlem in the 1920s, Loften Mitchell began to write as a child, creating scripts for backyard shows that he and his brother performed. After completing junior high school, he decided to enroll at New York Textile High because he had been promised a job on the school newspaper. But Mitchell soon realized that he needed the training of an academic high school and, with the help of one of his teachers, transferred to DeWitt Clinton.

Graduating with honors, Mitchell found a job as an elevator operator and a delivery boy to support himself while he studied playwriting at night at the City College of New York. However, he met a professor from Talladega College in Alabama who helped him win a scholarship to study there. He graduated with honors in 1943, having won an award for the best play written by a student.

After two years of service in the U.S. Navy, Mitchell enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University in New York. A year later, he accepted a job with the city’s department of welfare as a social investigator and continued to attend school at night. During this time, he wrote one of his first successful plays, Blood in the Night, and in 1957 he wrote A Land Beyond the River, which had a long run at an off-Broadway theater and was also published as a book.

The following year Mitchell won a Guggenheim award, which enabled him to return to Columbia University and write for a year. Later, he wrote a play called Star of the Morning, the story of Bert Williams, famous African American entertainer.

Mitchell was an early leader of the Black Theatre movement, and in 1967, Mitchell published a study of African American theater entitled Black Drama. His other books include: Tell Pharaoh, a play; The Stubborn Old Lady Who Resisted Change (1973), a novel; and Voices of the Black Theatre (1976). Mitchell also wrote the books for various Broadway musicals, including Ballads for Bimshire (1963), Bubbling Brown Sugar (1975), Cartoons for a Lunch Hour (1978), A Gypsy Girl (1982), and Miss Ethel Waters (1983).

Mitchell died on May 14, 2001, in Queens, New York. He was 82.

TONI MORRISON (1931– ) Novelist, Editor

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931, Toni Morrison received a B.A. degree from Howard University in 1953, and an M.A. from Cornell in 1955. After working as an instructor in English and the humanities at Texas Southern University and Howard University, Morrison eventually became a senior editor at Random House in New York City, where, for more than 20 years, she was responsible for the publication of many books by African Americans including Middleton Harris’s The Black Book (edited by Toni Morrison), and books by Toni Cade Bambara, among others. From 1971 to 1972, Morrison was also an associate professor at the State University of New York at Purchase. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, she wrote and published her novels, in addition to holding visiting professorships at Yale University and Bard College. From 1984 to 1989, she served as Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at the State University of New York at Albany. In 1989, Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1969, followed by Sula, which won the 1975 Ohioana Book Award and also gained the honor in 2002 of being the final book in Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Morrison’s third novel, Song of Solomon (1977) received the 1977 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 1978 American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. Tar Baby was published in 1981, followed by the play, Dreaming Emmett, first produced in Albany, New York, in 1986. Beloved, published in 1987, is regarded by some as her most significant work. The historical novel won both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. Beloved was also a finalist for the 1988 National Book Critics Circle Award and was one of the three contenders for the Ritz Hemingway Prize in Paris, from which no winner emerged. In addition, Beloved was a National Book Award finalist. Beloved was also adapted for the silver screen by television talk-show host and actress Oprah Winfrey. In the 1990s, Morrison has written a collection of essays and two novels—Jazz (1992) and Paradise (1997). She published another novel, Love, in 2003 and a nonfiction work entitled Remember: The Journey to School Integration in 2004.

Morrison was elected to the American Institute of Arts and Letters in 1981 and gave the keynote address at the American Writers’ Congress in New York City in the fall of that year. She won the New York State Governor’s Art Award in 1986. In 1993, the American Literature Association’s Coalition of Author Societies founded The Toni Morrison Society, an education group, in Atlanta. Later in the year, Morrison received her highest honor and made history when she became the first African American recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, an award that included an $825,000 prize. In 1995, her alma mater, Howard University, bestowed her with an honorary doctorate.

In 2001, Morrison was honored by Alfred A. Knopf and the Toni Morrison Society at a 70th birthday celebration. She is currently working on a set of six illustrated modernized Aesop’s fables with her son Slade Morrison; the first three volumes were published in 2003 and 2004.

In 2006, Morrison announced that she was retiring from her post at Princeton, and in that same year, the New York Times Book Review named Beloved the best novel of the past 25 years.

WALTER MOSLEY (1952– ) Novelist

Walter Mosley achieved national publicity when, during the 1992 U.S. presidential campaign, Bill Clinton credited him as his favorite mystery writer. Born on January 12, 1952, and raised in the Watts and Pico-Fairfax districts of Los Angeles, Mosely’s unique heritage is attributed to an African American father from the Deep South and a white, Jewish mother whose family emigrated from Eastern Europe.

After drifting among a variety of jobs, including potter, caterer, and computer programmer, he settled in New York City and attended the writing program at City College. By 1987, he had become a full-time writer. Although Mosley’s first book, a short psychological novel entitled Gone Fishin’ (later released in 1997) was turned down by numerous agents, he achieved rapid success in 1990 with Devil in a Blue Dress. In the next several years, A Red Death, White Butterfly, and Black Betty were also greeted with critical acclaim.

Mosley incorporates social and racial issues into gripping novels that authentically portray inner city life in the African American neighborhoods of post-World War II Los Angeles. His creation of the recurring multidimensional character, private investigator and World War II veteran, Ezekiel (“Easy”) Rawlins, was heavily influenced by the experiences of Mosley’s own father as an African American soldier in World War II and later a southern immigrant in California. With his African American viewpoint and confrontation of shifting societal and moral issues, Mosley has been praised for breaking new ground within the mystery and detective genre and inspiring a new brand of African American fiction. Mosley published six books in the Rawlins series from 2002 to 2006; several more volumes in the Fearless Jones series; and The Wave, a science fiction work, in 2005.

Mosley received several honors including the John Creasey Memorial Award and Shamus Award for outstanding mystery writing. In 1990, the Mystery Writers of America nominated Devil in a Blue Dress for an Edgar Award. The film version of Devil in a Blue Dress, with a screenplay penned by the author, was released in 1996. Directed by Carl Franklin, the film starred Denzel Washington as Rawlins. In 1995, Mosely published R. L.’s Dream, a fictional meditation on the blues. In the following year, he released A Little Yellow Dog. In 1997, he published the book Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, introducing his most compelling new character since the debut of Easy Rawlins: Socrates Fortlow, a tough, brooding ex-convict determined to challenge and understand the violence and anarchy in his world—and in himself. He continued on with the character of Socrates Fortlow in his 1998 offering Walkin’ the Dog.

Tackling the e-market, Mosley put out Whispers in the Dark and The Greatest in 2000, available solely on the Internet. In 2001, Mosley shifted gears once again, this time introducing narrator and used bookseller Paris Minton in Fearless Jones. Mosley went back to the short story

format for his 2002 book, Futureland: Nine stories of an Imminent World about a grim cyber-filled future. He also won a Grammy award in 2002 for best album liner notes for Richard Pryor . . . And It’s Deep Too!: The Complete Warner Bros. Recordings (1968–1992).

WALTER DEAN MYERS (1937– ) Young Adult Writer

Walter Milton Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in 1937. Upon the death of his mother when he was three years old, Myers was raised by a foster couple, Herbert and Florence Dean, in Harlem. Myers began writing as a child and was praised in grade school for his academic achievements. Determined to further his education, he joined the U.S. Army at 17 years of age, enabling him to pay part of his college tuition with money from the G.I. Bill. In 1969, upon the publication of his first picture book for children, Myers was determined to become a professional writer. Where Does the Day Go? was honored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children and established Myers as an author who addressed the needs of minority children.

Myers worked as a senior editor for the Bobbs-Merrill publishing house, released more picture books, and began writing young adult stories in the 1970s. Since then, he has published more than two dozen novels in which he tackles urban social issues, such as teen pregnancy, crime, drug abuse, and gang violence. Myers’s authentic dialogue and ability to capture the universal ties and strengthening powers of family and friendship within African American communities prompted great response from teenage readers.

Committed to producing quality literature for African American children, he branched into fairy tales, ghost stories, science fiction, adventure sagas, and a popular biography entitled Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary. Myers has won a variety of awards including the Coretta Scott King Award and the Newbery “honor book” citation for Scorpions. Myers’s novels, particularly Hoops, Fallen Angels, and Motown and Didi: A Love Story, are an enduring presence on both high school and young adult recommended reading lists. In 2004, Myers published Antarctica: Journeys to the South Pole, Poems, and Shooter (teen fiction), and in 2005, he published Autobiography of My Dead Brother.

GLORIA NAYLOR (1950– ) Novelist

Gloria Naylor was born in New York City on January 25, 1950, and still lives there. She received a B.A. in English from Brooklyn College in 1981 and an M.A. in Afro-American Studies from Yale University in 1983. She has taught writing and literature at George Washington University, New York University, Brandeis University, Cornell University, and Boston University. In 1983, she won the American Book Award for first fiction for her novel, The Women of Brewster Place, which was produced for television in 1988. Her second novel was Linden Hills, published in 1985. Her third novel, Mama Day (1988) was written with the aid of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988, Naylor was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1993, she published a new novel, Bailey’s Café.

In 1998, Naylor returned to familiar ground with her novel, The Men of Brewster Place. This was a different spin on the gritty but secure community that had brought Naylor into the public spotlight, and, much like The Women of Brewster Place, this book was hailed by critics for its characterization and positive messages.

Naylor, who is currently working on a sequel to her novel, Mama Day—called Sapphira Wade—heads her own production company. One of the goals of the company is to present positive images of the African American community in its projects.

ANN LANE PETRY (c.1912–1997) Novelist, Short Story Writer

Ann Petry was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, on October 12, 1912, where her father was a druggist. After graduating from the College of Pharmacy at the

University of Connecticut, she went to New York where she found employment as a social worker and newspaper reporter, studying creative writing at night.

Her early short stories appeared in Crisis and Phylon. In 1946, after having received a Houghton Mifflin Fellowship, she completed and published her first novel, The Street. The Street focuses on the lives of African American women in a crowded tenement. Through her exploration of this subject, Petry became the first African American woman writer to address the problems African American women face as they live in the slums.

Petry also wrote Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), and Miss Munel and Other Stories (1971). Her works for children and young people include The Drugstore Cat, Harriet Tubman, Tituba of Salem Village, and Legends of Saints. Many of her earlier novels are being reprinted. Petry died on April 28, 1997.

ARNOLD RAMPERSAD (1941– ) Literary Critic

Arnold Rampersad was born on November 13, 1941, in Trinidad. He received a B.A. and M.A. from Bowling Green State University, as well as a M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Rampersad, who was appointed a MacArthur Foundation fellow from 1991 to 1996, has taught at Stanford University (1974–1983), Rutgers University (1983–1988), Columbia University (1988–1990), and Princeton University (1990–1998). In 1998, Rampersad returned to Stanford University, where he is the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities.

Rampersad’s first book is Melville’s Israel Potter: A Pilgrimage and Progress (1969). Starting with Rampersad’s next book, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (1976), he began chronicling the lives and/or works of the most prominent African American men of the twentieth century. Rampersad is the co-author of tennis player, Arthur Ashe’s Days of Grace: A Memoir (1993), and author of Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997). Rampersad has edited three books about Richard Wright’s writings: Richard Wright: Early Works: Lawd Today!/Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son (1991); Richard Wright’s Later Works: Black Boy [American Hunger], The Outsider (1991); and Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays (1994). Rampersad has edited four books on the works of one of Wright’s most famous contemporaries, Langston Hughes. These books are The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994) as well as The Collected Works of Langston Hughes: Volume 1: The Poems: 1921–1940 (2001); Volume 2: The Poems: 1941–1950 (2001); and Volume 3: The Poems: 1951–1967 (2001). These last three books are the beginning trio of the University of Missouri Press’s 18-volume compilation of the poems, novels, plays, short stories, essays, and other works by Hughes, the dean of African American letters. Rampersad is the chair of the four-member editorial board for The Collected Works of Langston Hughes. Heisalsoworkingona biography of the novelist Ralph Ellison.

Rampersad is best known for his two-volume The Life of Langston Hughes: 1902–1941, I, Too, Sing America (1986), which won the 1987 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations, Cleveland Foundation, as well as the 1988 Clarence L. Holte Prize; and Volume 2: 1941–1967: I Dream a World (1988), which was a 1989 Pulitzer Prize finalist in biography and winner of a 1990 American Book Award. Rampersad’s work is considered the definitive biography of Hughes. Rita Dove, in a New York Times Book Review, wrote, “In his superlative study of . . . the most prominent Afro-American poet of our century, Arnold Rampersad has performed that most difficult of feats: illuminating a man who, despite all his public visibility, was quite elusive.” John A. Williams commented in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, “No other biography of Hughes can match the grace and richness of Rampersad’s writing, or his investigative and interpretive abilities.” David Nicholson opined in the Washington Post Book World, “This may be the best biography of a black writer we have had.”

Rampersad has co-edited Slavery and the Literary Imagination (with Deborah McDowell, 1989) and The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (1997), which is the benchmark compilation of the African American literary tradition by which all subsequent anthologies of black literature will be judged. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie McKay were the general editors of The Norton Anthology, and Rampersad was one of the nine additional editors. He is also a co-editor of the Race and American Culture book series published by Oxford University Press.

Rampersad’s impressive publications place him in the forefront as a literary historian/critic.

ISHMAEL REED (1938– ) Novelist, Poet

Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on February 22, 1938, Ishmael Reed grew up in Buffalo, New York. He attended State University of New York at Buffalo from 1956 to 1960. He worked as a reporter and later as an editor for the Newark Advance in New Jersey before co-founding the East Village Other in 1965. Reed spent the next few years teaching prose and guest lecturing at different institutions including the University of California at Berkeley. In 1971, he co-founded Yardbird Publishing Co., Inc. After four years as the editorial director, he co-founded Reed, Cannon & Johnson Communications Co., a publisher and producer of videos, and in 1976, the Before Columbus Foundation, which produced and distributed works by ethnic writers not yet established.

One of the most controversial figure in African American letters, Reed has published poetry, novels, plays, and prose satirizing American political, religious, and literary repression. Considered by some to be misogynistic and cynical, others find his work innovative. He is committed to creating an alternative African American aesthetic, which he calls “Neo-HooDooism.” One hallmark of the movement is the reliance on satire and social criticism.

Reed’s works of poetry include: catechism of d neo-american hoodoo church (1971); Conjure (1972), which was nominated for the National Book Award; Chattanooga (1973); A Secretary to the Spirits (1978); and New and Collected Poetry (1988). His poetry has also appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines including The Poetry of the Negro, The New Black Poetry, The Norton Anthology, Cricket, and Scholastic magazine.

Reed’s novels include: The Free-lance Pallbearers (1967); Yellow Back Radio Broke Down (1969); Mumbo Jumbo, which also received a National Book Award nomination; The Last Days of Louisiana Red (1974); Flight to Canada (1976); The Terrible Twos (1982); Reckless Eyeballing; The Terrible Threes (1989); and Japanese by Spring (1992). He also wrote three plays: The Lost State of Franklin (1976); Savage Wilds; and its sequel Savage Wilds II.

Prose works by Reed include: Shrovetide in Old New Orleans (1978); God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected Essays (1982); Writin’ Is Fightin’: Thirty-seven Years of Boxing on Paper (1988); and Airing Dirty Laundry (1993). He was also the editor of Multi-America: Essays on Cultural Wars and Cultural Peace in 1997.

Reed’s career has been rich in recognition. In 1974, he won the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Award for fiction. The next year he received a Rosenthal Foundation Award and an honor from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In 1978, Reed earned the Lewis Michaux and American CivilLiberties awards. The following year he was given the Pushcart Prize. He has received fellowships from the Wisconsin Board and Yale University’s Calhoun College in 1982; grants have come from New York State, the National Endowment for the Arts, the MacArthur Foundation, and the California Arts Council.

SONIA SANCHEZ (1934– ) Poet, Playwright

Sonia Sanchez was born Wilsonia Driver on September 9, 1934, in Birmingham, Alabama. Her mother died in Sanchez’ infancy, and Sanchez moved to Harlem with her father and siblings at the age of nine. She studied at New York University and Hunter College in New York City. She married and divorced Albert Sanchez and later married Etheridge Knight, an African American writer of poetry and fiction. She has taught at San Francisco State College and is now teaching in the Black Studies Department of Temple University in Philadelphia. Her plays were published in The Drama Review (Summer 1968) and in New Plays from the Black Theatre (1969), edited by Ed Bullins. Her poems also have been published in many other magazines and anthologies. Books written or edited by her include ten volumes of poetry: Homecoming (1969); We a Bad People (1970); It’s a New Day (1971); A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women (1973); Love Poems (1975); I’ve Been a Woman (1978); Under a Soprano Sky (1987); Wounded in the House of a Friend (1994); Like the Singing Coming Off the Drums (1997); and Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems (1999). Sanchez has edited two anthologies: Three Hundred and Sixty Degrees of Blackness Coming at You, An Anthology of the Sonia Sanchez Writers Workshop at Countee Cullen Library in Harlem (1971); and We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans (1973). She has also written A Sound Investment (1979), a collection of short stories; homegirls and handgrenades (1984), which won an American Book Award; and Shake Loose My Skin (poems, 2000).

NTOZAKE SHANGE (1948– ) Playwright, Poet, Novelist

A playwright and poet, Paulette Linda Williams was born in Trenton, New Jersey, on October 18, 1948; she changed her name to Ntozake Shange in 1971. She graduated from Barnard College and received her master’s degree from the University of Southern California, where she did other graduate work. She studied Afro-American dance in California and actually performed with the Third World Collective, Raymond Sawyer’s Afro-American Dance Company, Sounds in Motion, and West Coast Dance Works.

Shange taught at Sonoma Mills College in California from 1972 to 1975. She went on to teach at CUNY and Douglas College to finish out the 1970s, before becoming the Mellon Distinguished Professor of Literature at Rice University in 1983. For three years she worked as an associate professor of drama at the University of Houston.

Shange’s play, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf, a choreopoem (poetry and dance), was first produced in California, after her dance-drama Sassafrass was presented in 1976. Later, For Colored Girls was produced in New York City, where it had a long run before going on to other cities. It earned Tony, Grammy, and Emmy award nominations in 1977. Among the other works by Shange that have been produced on the stage are Spell #7, A Photograph: Lovers in Motion (1979), and Boogie Woogie Landscapes (1979). For Colored Girls has been published as a book, and Shange’s collection Three Pieces (1981) contains Spell #7, A Photograph: Lovers in Motion, and Boogie Woogie Landscapes.

Other books by Shange include: Nappy Edges (poetry, 1978); Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (novel, 1982); A Daughter’s Geography (poetry, 1983); From Okra to Greens (a play, 1984); See No Evil: Prefaces & Accounts, 1976–1983 (1984); Betsey Brown (novel, 1985); Liliane: Resurrection of the Daughter (novel, 1994); I Live in Music (poetry, 1994); Whitewash (children’s novel, 1997); a history of food called If I Can Cook You Know God Can Cook (1998); Daddy Says (children’s novel, 2002); and Floodlight and Butterfly (children’s novel, 2002).

A version of Betsey Brown for the stage, with music by the jazz trumpeter and composer Baikida Carroll, opened the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, March 25, 1989. Shange directed Ina Cesaire’s Fire’s Daughters in 1993. The Broadway version of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow Is Enuf was revived in 1995.

Shange received an Obie Award in 1981 for Mother Courage and Her Children, and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize for poetry that year for Three Pieces. A Guggenheim fellow, Shange has been given awards by the Outer Critics Circle and the National Black Theater Festival (1993). She also won the Pushcart Prize.

LUCY TERRY (c.1730–1821) Poet

Lucy Terry is generally considered one of the first African American poets in the United States. In a ballad that she called “Bars Fight,” she recreated an Indian massacre that occurred in Deerfield, Massachusetts, in 1746 during King George’s War. “Bars Fight” has been hailed by some historians as the most authentic account of the massacre.

Terry was a semiliterate slave who was sold in Rhode Island and purchased, it is believed, by the Terry family in Enfield, CT. At the age of five, she was sold again and lived in the household of Ensign Ebenezer Wells of Deerfield, Massachusetts. She learned to read and may have been taught while in the Wells household, where she remained until 1756, when she married a freed African American slave named Abijah Prince. Terry won her freedom with the assistance of either her husband or Wells. The Prince house served as a center for young people who gathered to listen to their hostess’ storytelling in the oral tradition of the period. Only “Bars Fight” was ever published because Harriet Hitchcock, a Deerfield resident, wrote it down from memory after Terry’s death. Lucy Terry was a strong woman who argued eloquently for her family’s rights in several cases.

WALLACE H. THURMAN (1902–1934) Novelist, Playwright, Ghostwriter, Journalist

A caustic critic of African American writing, Wallace Thurman was a member of the New Negro movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. Wallace Henry Thurman, called Wally by his friends, was born on August 16, 1902, in Salt Lake City. He graduated from the University of Utah in 1922, having studied pre-medicine. He did postgraduate work in 1923 at the University of Southern California. He read widely and knew about the Harlem Renaissance then taking place in New York. He attempted a West Coast counterpart of the Harlem Renaissance and established his own short-lived literary magazine, The Outlet. He moved to New York City the following year.

Thurman was managing editor of the Messenger from spring to fall 1926, then moved to The World Tomorrow, a white-owned monthly. By now, Thurman and Lang-ston Hughes had become good friends and were a part of a new school known as Harlem Renaissance writers. The group included Arna Bontemps (whom he had known in Los Angeles), Nella Larsen, Dorothy West, Countee Cullen, Jessie Fauset, Aaron Douglas, Zora Neale Hurston, and Gwendolyn Bennett. In the summer of 1926, Thurman and the group established Fire!, a short-lived literary magazine that was both obscene and revolutionary. The magazine was to provide another outlet beyond Crisis and Opportunity magazines for young African American writers to have their works published. He had financed the magazine himself and spent four years paying its debt.

In 1927, many of Thurman’s articles were published in prestigious magazines, such as New Republic and Dance Magazine, further helping to establish him as a critic. The next year, McFadden Publications added Thurman to its editorial staff, and he continued to write. In 1929, he published the work for which he is best known, The Blacker the Berry the Sweeter the Juice, an autobiographical novel that embraced intra-race color prejudice and self-hatred. Thurman was also the ghostwriter for several magazines and books. He wrote several plays as well; one of them, Cordelia the Crude, premiered on Broadway, where it received mixed reviews. It went on to Chicago and Los Angeles.

In 1932, Thurman published two other novels: Infants of the Spring, and The Interne. An alcoholic homosexual, Thurman was often depressed and suicidal. He became ill with tuberculosis and died in New York on December 22, 1934.

JEAN TOOMER (1894–1967) Novelist, Poet

Jean Toomer’s Cane, published in 1923, has been called one of the three best novels ever written by an African American—the others being Richard Wright’s Native Son and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. According to Columbia University critic Robert Bone, “Cane is by far the most impressive product of the Negro Renaissance.”

A mixture of poems and sketches, Cane was written during that period in which most African American writers were reacting against earlier “polite” forms by creating works marked by literary realism. Toomer even went beyond this realm to the threshold of symbol and myth, using a “mystical” approach, which is much more akin to the contemporary mood than it was to the prevailing spirit of his own day. Cane sold only 500 copies on publication, and it was still little known until reprinted recently with new introductions. Much has been written about Toomer and Cane in recent years, including a Cane casebook.

Nathan Pinchback Toomer was born in Washington, D.C., in December of 1894. He was one of eight children of sharecroppers. His father left shortly after his son’s birth, and his mother, Nina Toomer, named the boy Nathan Eugene, a name he later shorted to Jean. Toomer was educated in law at the University of Wisconsin and City College of New York before he turned to writing. The transcendental nature of his writings is said to have stemmed in part from his early study under Gurdjieff, the Russian mystic.

Toomer had a reputation for having scandalous affairs with married women. In 1931, Toomer married Margery Latimer, daughter of a wealthy New York Stock Exchange member, friend of his former lover, Georgia O’Keefe, and a well-known author. Like Toomer, she was a follower of Gurdjieff.

Toomer published quite a bit of poetry in his lifetime. Darwin T. Turner edited The Wayward and The Seeking: A Collection of Writings by Jean Toomer (1980), a book of his poetry, short stories, dramas, and autobiography. Other books about Toomer and his writings include: Therman O’Daniel’s Jean Toomer: A Critical Evaluation (1985); over 40 essays of the most thorough, up-to-date scholarship on Toomer; Robert B. Jones and Margery Toomer Latimer’s The Collected Poems of Jean Toomer (1988); 55 poems; and Nellie Y. McKay’s Jean Toomer, Artist: A Study of His Literary Life and Work, 1894–1936 (1984, 1987). Toomer died of cancer on March 10, 1967.

ALICE WALKER (1944– ) Poet, Novelist

Alice Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, on February 9, 1944. She was educated at Spelman College (1961–1963) and Sarah Lawrence College, from which she received her B.A. in 1965. That year, she worked as a voter registrar in Georgia and worked for the welfare department in New York City. In 1967, she moved to Mississippi, where she was an African American literature consultant for Friends of the Children of Mississippi. From 1968 to 1971, she was a writer-in-residence at Jackson State and Tougaloo Colleges. Moving to Boston, she then lectured at Wellesley and the University of Massachusetts until 1973. While teaching in the early 1970s, she was a Radcliffe Institute fellow.

Walker’s work began to be published in the late 1960s, starting with Once: Poems in 1968. Two years later, she published the novel, The Third Life Grange Copeland. These two works were quickly followed by a succession of works, including Revolutionary Peturnias and Other Poems (1973), which earned a National Book Award nomination and the Lillian Smith Award; In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, recipient of a Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; and Langston Hughes: American Biography (for children).

The novel, Meridian (1976), was followed in 1979 by a book of poetry entitled Goodnight, Willie Lee, I’ll See You in the Morning and an edited work by Walker titled I Love Myself When I’m Laughing. . .and Then Again When I Am Looking Mean and Impressive: A Zora Neale Hurston Reader. The book was particularly important because it brought about a resurgence of interest in a Harlem Renaissance writer who had been overshadowed by other, better known authors.

In the 1980s, Walker more formally resumed her teaching career, spending the year of 1982 as the Fannie Hurst Professor of Literature at Brandeis University, while also serving as a distinguished writer as the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, she co-founded Wild Trees Press. That decade’s works include the short story collection You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down (1981); two collections of essays and journal entries, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (1983) and Living by the Word: Selected Writings, (1973–1987); a book of poetry entitled Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful (1984); To Hell With Dying (juvenile story, 1988); and the novel, The Temple of My Familiar (1989). In 1986, she received the O. Henry Award for her short story, “Kindred Spirits.”

Walker’s most well-received work, however, was the 1983 novel, The Color Purple. Written in the form of a series of letters, the novel was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won an American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Walker was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize. The bestselling book was adapted into an award-winning film featuring Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, Oprah Winfrey, and Margaret Avery in 1985, and became a successful Broadway musical in 2005.

In the 1990s, Walker continued writing. Possessing the Secret of Joy, loosely a sequel to The Color Purple, was released in 1992. The Same River Twice: Honoring the Difficult came out four years later. By the Light of My Father’s Smile was published in 1998, and Walker also published a book of short stories in 2000 entitled The Way Forward is With a Broken Heart. In 2006, Walker published a book for children entitled There is a Flower at the Tip of My Nose Smelling Me.

Holder of numerous honorary degrees, Walker has received a Merrill Fellowship for writing, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, and other honors.

MARGARET A. WALKER (1915–1998) Poet, Novelist

Born Margaret Abigail Walker on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, she received her early education in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi. Walker earned her B.A. from Northwestern University and her M.A. (1940) and Ph.D. (1966), both from the University of Iowa.

In 1942, Walker published For My People and, two years later, was awarded a Rosenwald Fellowship for creative writing. She has taught English and literature at Livingston College in North Carolina, West Virginia State College, and Jackson State College in Mississippi. Her novel Jubilee appeared in 1965. For My People was reprinted in 1969. Her other works are Prophets for a New Day, How I Wrote Jubilee, October Journey, and A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. The date of June 17, 1976, was proclaimed Margaret Walker Alexander Day by the mayor of her native Birmingham.

Walker’s other works include Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988). A second edition of A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker was published in 1983. Walker’s poetry, which became increasingly political, had a major impact on African American poets of the 1960s and 1970s. She died of breast cancer on November 30, 1998, in Chicago.

DOROTHY WEST (1907–1998) Novelist, Short Story Writer, Journalist

Dorothy West was the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, the period of the late 1920s and early 1930s when an outpouring of writing and poetry exuded from the pens and typewriters of African American writers based in Harlem. West was known as “The Kid” by such luminaries as Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston. West wrote short stories for the New York Daily News in the 1930s, and twice, during the Great Depression, founded African American literary journals, most notably the New Challenge.

West was born on June 2, 1907, in Boston. She later moved to New York City, but eventually returned home, moving into her family’s summer home in Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard in 1943. Five years later, she wrote her first novel, The Living Is Easy, the novel for which she is best known, based on the affluent world of African American achievers. West continued to write short stories for the Daily News from her Oak Bluffs home for the next 25 years.

In the 1950s, West began a second novel, The Wedding, but could not find a publisher interested in handling it. With its theme of interracial marriage, it may have been too hot a topic for the times and was put aside by West in an unfinished state. Instead, West started contributing short pieces to the Vineyard’s daily newspaper in the 1970s.

West again enjoyed fame in the 1990s. In 1992, West’s stories caught the eye of former First Lady Jacqueline Onassis, an editor at Doubleday and a summer resident of Martha’s Vineyard. Onassis encouraged West to finish The Wedding, and the two of them began meeting weekly. With Onassis acting as West’s editor, the novel finally was published in 1995. West dedicated the novel to Onassis. The story was made into a television

movie, produced by Oprah Winfrey, and aired in 1998. West died on August 16, 1998.

PHILLIS WHEATLEY (c.1753–1784) Poet

Born in Senegal in 1753, Phillis Wheatley was brought to the United States as a slave and received her name from Susannah Wheatley, the wife of the Boston tailor who had bought Phillis. Wheatley received her early education in the household of her master. Her interest in writing stemmed from her reading of the Bible and the classics under the guidance of the Wheatleys’ daughter, Mary.

In 1770, her first poem was printed under the title “A Poem by Phillis, A Negro Girl on the Death of Reverend George Whitefield.” Her book, Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral, was published in London in 1773, the first book of poetry published by an African American. She took a trip to England for health reasons, but later returned to the United States and was married. She published the poem “Liberty and Peace” in 1784, shortly before her death. Most of the old books of her poems, letters, and memories about her life were reprinted in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Two books about Wheatley are Julian D. Mason Jr.’s The Poems of Phillis Wheatley (1966) and William H. Robinson’s Phillis Wheatley, A Biography (1981). Robinson also compiled and published Phillis Wheatley: A Bio-Bibliography (1981).

Although George Washington was among her admirers (she had once sent him a tributary poem, which he graciously acknowledged), her poetry is considered important today largely because of its historical role in the growth of African American literature. Wheatley’s poetry reflects Anglo-Saxon models rather than her African heritage. It is, nevertheless, a typical example of the verse manufactured in a territory—the British colonies—not yet divorced from its maternal origins. Wheatley died on December 5, 1784.

JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN (1941– ) Writer, Educator

Wideman has been one of the leading chroniclers of life in urban black America, depicting the widening chasm between the urban poor and the white power structure in the United States. He is known for intertwining ghetto experiences with experimental fiction techniques, personal history, and social events to highlight deep cultural conflicts. A prolific writer, Wideman is the only two-time winner of the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for literature, one for Sent for You Yesterday (1983), and one for Philadelphia Fire (1990). He published The Cattle Killing (1996) and Two Cities (1998), both novels.

In addition to novels, he has written short stories and nonfiction, including Brothers and Keepers (1984), a juxtaposition of his life and that of his younger brother, incarcerated for taking part in a larceny/murder. The examination of the two brothers’ different lives was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2005, he published a collection of short stories entitled God’s Gym.

Born on June 14, 1941, in Washington, D.C., Wideman was the first of five children. Growing up in Pittsburgh, where the family moved, Wideman attended highly regarded Peabody High School. A top student, he was also class president and captain of the basketball team. Enrolling at the University of Pittsburgh on a scholarship, he earned a B.A. in 1963. During his undergraduate career, Wideman made the Big Five Basketball Hall of Fame, won the university’s creative writing prize, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He received a Rhodes Scholarship to England’s Oxford University, becoming the first African American to receive such recognition in more than 50 years. With a B.A. in philosophy obtained from Oxford’s New College in 1966, Wideman began writing and teaching at such institutions as the Universities of Pennsylvania, Wyoming, and, since 1986, Massachusetts at Amherst.

AUGUST WILSON (1945–2005) Playwright

One of the most important voices in the American theater, playwright August Wilson became a spokesperson for the black experience in America. Since his first stage success, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom in 1984, he celebrated people of color in several plays, all set in a different decade in the twentieth century. In 1997, he elicited a public debate involving many prominent theater critics on the use of theater as a vehicle for cultural nationalism.

Wilson was born Frederick August Kittel in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1945 and was the oldest of six children. His mother was a house cleaner; his absent father was a baker. He left school at 15 due to the racist abuse he endured there. But he continued his education in the local library, reading all the literature by African American writers, such as Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and others. He published a few poems in Black World and Black Lines in the early 1970s after absorbing the works of Robert Frost, Dylan Thomas, and Amiri Baraka.

It was when Wilson discovered the writings of Malcolm X that he decided to use cultural nationalism, African American people working toward cultural self-

determination, as a basis for playwriting. In 1969, he helped found the African American activist theater company, Black Horizons on the Hill, which focused on politicizing the community and raising African American consciousness. He staged some early plays through this association, but moved to St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1978 where he says he gained some clarity and became less radicalized. He immediately wrote Jitney for the Minneapolis Playwrights Center and won a fellowship prize.

Wilson moved the location of Jitney and his next work, Fullerton Street, back to Pittsburgh and produced them at the Allegheny Repertory Theater. After two years of work at the National Playwright Conference, his first major work, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, caught the eye of Yale Repertory Theater’s artistic director Lloyd Richards. Together, they staged almost all of Wilson’s works, Richards directing them himself.

Each of Wilson’s plays tells the story of a different segment of the African American experience. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom tells how African American entertainers were exploited by whites in the 1920s. His next play, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, discusses the migration of African Americans from rural Southern areas to the industrial cities of the North. Fences became an immediate hit when it opened on Broadway in 1987. Actor James Earl Jones played the main character, Troy Maxson, who dreams of playing professional baseball in the 1950s, only to be victimized by white racism. This play won the Pulitzer Prize and other awards for Wilson.

In 1990, August Wilson won his second Pulitzer Prize for The Piano Lesson, a play that focuses on a family conflict over selling an heirloom piano once traded for slave ancestors whose portraits are carved into it. Then he produced Two Trains Running in 1992, a play about the late 1960s when racial strife and the Vietnam War divided the nation.

Wilson moved to Seattle in the early 1990s. His next play, Seven Guitars, opened in 1996. Set in Pittsburgh in 1948, the unseen main character’s death is being mourned at a wake. The seven characters reminisce with music and dream the future. This is another successful production by Wilson and director Lloyd Richards.

The 1997 debate began when Wilson gave a keynote speech to the Theater Communications Group Conference. Entitled “The Ground on Which I Stand,” it celebrated the achievements of African American theater and insisted that African American theater was understood and appreciated only by those living the African American experience. He castigated the New York mainstream theater and its critics for lack of support for African American theater. In turn, many New York critics, including Robert Brustein, Frank Rich, and John Simon, published editorial columns analyzing Wilson’s speech. Ultimately, a face-to-face debate was held by Wilson and Brustein in January 1998 to discuss the cultural intentions of theater: Wilson/politicization vs. Brustein/universal truth. At the end of the evening, the issue remained alive and well. Wilson had revisited his earlier black nationalist beliefs and continued to evoke questions about the African American experience.

In 2001, Wilson was presented with the prestigious Washington Literary Award, and in 2002, he was the only American to be honored with an award at the 26th annual Laurence Olivier Awards. Wilson died of liver cancer in Seattle on October 2, 2005, and 14 days after his death, the Virginia Theatre on Broadway was renamed the August Wilson Theatre in his honor. Wilson’s greatest legacy is not only his cycle of 10 plays depicting the effects of racism on the African American community during each decade of the twentieth century, but also his impact on a new generation of African American writers.

RICHARD WRIGHT (1908–1960) Novelist

Born on September 4, 1908, on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi, Wright drew on his personal experience to dramatize racial injustice and its brutalizing effects. In 1938, under the auspices of the Works Progress Administration Illinois Writers Project, Wright published Uncle Tom’s Children, a collection of four novellas based on his Mississippi boyhood memories. The book won an award for the best work of fiction by a WPA writer, and Wright received a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Two years later, Native Son, a novel of Chicago’s African American ghetto, further enhanced Wright’s reputation. A Book-of-the-Month Club choice, it was later a successful Broadway production under Orson Welles’ direction and was filmed in South America with Wright himself in the role of Bigger Thomas. He published Twelve Million Black Voices in 1941.

In 1945, Wright’s largely autobiographical Black Boy was selected by the Book-of-the-Month Club and went on to become his second bestseller. Wright later moved to Paris where he continued to write fiction and nonfiction including: The Outsider (1953); Black Power (1954); Savage Holiday (1954, 1965); The Color Curtain (1956); White Man Listen (1957); The Long Dream (1958); Lawd Today (1963); Eight Men (1961); and American Hunger (1977), a continuation of Wright’s autobiographical work, Black Boy.

Wright died of a heart attack on November 28, 1960. There are over a dozen books written about him, two casebooks on Native Son, a children’s book, and a critical pamphlet in a writer’s series.

AWARD WINNERS

AMERICAN ACADEMY AND INSTITUTE OF ARTS AND LETTERS AWARD

1946: Gwendolyn Brooks; Langston Hughes

1956: James Baldwin

1962: John A. Williams

1970: James A. McPherson

1971: Charles Gordone

1972: Michael S. Harper

1974: Henry Van Dyke

1978: Lerone Bennett Jr.; Toni Morrison

1985: John Williams

1987: Ernest J. Gaines

1992: August Wilson

1994: Adrienne Kennedy

2001: Carl Phillips

2002: Charles Johnson

CLARENCE L. HOLTE LITERARY PRIZE

Co-sponsored by the Phelps-Stokes Fund and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library

1979: Chancellor Williams, The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.

1981: Ivan Van Sertima, They Came Before Columbus: The African Presence in Ancient America

1983: Vincent Harding, There Is a River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America

1986: John Hope Franklin, George Washington Williams: A Biography

1988: Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: 1902-1941, I, Too, Sing America

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD—NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION

1953: Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, Fiction

1969: Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812, History and Biography

1983: Gloria Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, First Novel; Joyce Carol Thomas, Marked By Fire, Children’s Fiction (Paperback); Alice Walker, The Color Purple, Fiction (Hardcover)

1990: Charles Johnson, Middle Passage, Fiction

2000: Lucille Clifton, Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988–2000, Poetry

NOBEL PRIZE

1993: Toni Morrison

PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

1982: David Bradley, The Chaneysville Incident

1984: John Edgar Wideman, Sent for you Yesterday

1991: John Edgar Wideman, Philadelphia Fire

PULITZER PRIZE

Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Biography or Autobiography

1994: W.E.B. DuBois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919, David Levering Lewis

2001: W.E.B. DuBois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963, David Levering Lewis

Letters: Fiction

1978: Elbow Room, James Alan McPherson

1983: The Color Purple, Alice Walker

1988: Beloved, Toni Morrison

Letters: Poetry

1950: Annie Allen, Gwendolyn Brooks

1987: Thomas and Beulah, Rita Dove

1994: Neon Vernacular, Yusef Komunyakaa

Letters: Drama

1982: A Soldier’s Play, Charles Fuller

1987: Fences, August Wilson

1990: The Piano Lesson, August Wilson

2002: Topdog/Underdog, Susan-Lori Parks

Letters: Special Awards and Citations

1977: Alex Haley, Roots

Journalism: Commentary

1989: Clarence Page

1994: William Raspberry

1996: E. R. Shipp

Journalism: Feature Writing

1999: Angelo B. Henderson