Amiri Baraka
Poems and plays, such as Dutchman (1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
He attended Barringer high school. Coyt Leverette Jones, his father, worked as a postal supervisor and lift operator. Anna Lois Russ Jones, his mother, worked as a social worker.
He studied at Rutgers, Columbia, and Howard universities but left without a degree and attended the new school for social research. He won a scholarship to Rutgers in 1951, but a continuing sense of cultural dislocation prompted him to transfer in 1952 to Howard. He studied philosophy and religion, major fields. Jones also served three years in the air force as a gunner. Jones continued his studies of comparative literature at Colum
If you like author Amiri Baraka here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (73)
-
Nelson George
Nelson George is an author, filmmaker, television producer, and critic with a long career in analyzing and presenting the diverse elements of African-American culture.
Buy books on Amazon
Queen Latifah won the Golden Globe for playing the lead in his directorial debut, the HBO movie 'Life Support'. The critically acclaimed drama looked at the effects of HIV on a troubled black family in his native Brooklyn, New York. He recently co-edited, with Alan Leeds, 'The James Brown Reader (Plume)', a collection of previously published articles about the Godfather of Soul that date as far back the late '50s. Plume published the book in May '08.
He is an executive producer on two returning cable shows: the third season of BET's American Gangster and the fifth airing of VH1 -
Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author.
Buy books on Amazon
She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off- -
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v.
Buy books on Amazon -
Candace Owens
Candace Owens is an American conservative commentator and political activist. She is known for her pro-Trump activism and her criticism of Black Lives Matter and of the Democratic Party. In October 2018, Owens launched the Blexit movement, a campaign to encourage African Americans to abandon the Democratic Party. She worked for the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA between 2017 and 2019. She hosts the Candace Owens Show on PragerU's YouTube channel.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ivan Van Sertima
Dr. Ivan Van Sertima was born in Guyana, South America. He was educated at the School of Oriental and African Studies (London University) and the Rutgers Graduate School and held degrees in African Studies and Anthropology. From 1957-1959 he served as a Press and Broadcasting Officer in the Guyana Information Services. During the decade of the 1960s he broadcast weekly from Britain to Africa and the Caribbean.
Buy books on Amazon
He was a literary critic, a linguist, and an anthropologist who made a name in all three fields.
As a literary critic, he is the author of Caribbean Writers, a collection of critical essays on the Caribbean novel. He is also the author of several major literary reviews published in Denmark, India, Britain and the United States. He was -
Chancellor Williams
Dr. Chancellor Williams was born in Bennettsville, South Carolina. He received his undergraduate degree in Education and Master of Arts degree in history from Howard University. He studied abroad serving as a visiting research scholar at the Unversity of Oxford in England and at the University of London.
Buy books on Amazon
Chancellor Williams began field research in African History in Ghana (University College) in 1956. His primary focus was on African achievments and autonomous civilizations before Asian and European influences. His last study in 1964 covered an astounding 26 countries and more than 100 language groups. His best known work is "The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D." For this effort, Dr. Willi -
James Walvin
James Walvin taught for many years at the University of York where he is now Professor of History Emeritus. He also held visiting positions in the Caribbean, the U.S.A. and Australia. He won the prestigious Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for his book Black and White, and has published widely on the history of slavery and the slave trade. His book The People's Game was a pioneering study of the history of football and remains in print thirty years after its first publication.
Buy books on Amazon -
Angelina Weld Grimké
American journalist, teacher, playwright and poet who came to prominence during the Harlem Renaissance. She was one of the first women of color to have a play publicly performed.
Buy books on Amazon
Not to be confused with her great-aunt Angelina Emily Grimké, an abolitionist author. -
Derek Bailey
Derek Bailey was an English avant-garde guitarist and an important figure in the free improvisation movement. Bailey abandoned conventional performance techniques found in jazz, exploring atonality, noise, and whatever unusual sounds he could produce with the guitar. Much of his work was released on his own label Incus Records. In addition to solo work, Bailey collaborated frequently with other musicians and recorded with collectives such as Spontaneous Music Ensemble and Company.
Buy books on Amazon -
Francis Davis
Francis Davis was an American author and journalist. He was best known as the jazz critic for The Village Voice, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly. He had also worked in radio and film, and taught courses on Jazz and Blues at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a 1994 recipient of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts.
Buy books on Amazon -
Robert Gordon
Robert Gordon (b. 1961) is an American writer and filmmaker from Memphis, Tennessee. His work has focused on the American south—its music, art, and politics—to create an insider's portrait of his home, both nuanced and ribald.
Buy books on Amazon -
Paula L. Woods
Paula is a member of Mystery Writers of America, the International Association of Crime Writers, and Sisters in Crime. She has also served as an Edgar judge, on the Author Committee of the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books and speaker at the festival.
Buy books on Amazon
A native of Los Angeles, Paula's lifelong love of books has resulted in the growth of her personal library to over 1,000 volumes.
Series:
* Charlotte Justice Mystery -
Sly Stone
Sylvester Stewart, better known by his stage name Sly Stone, was an American musician, songwriter, and record producer. He was the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, playing a critical role in the development of funk with his pioneering fusion of soul, rock, psychedelia, and gospel in the 1960s and 1970s. AllMusic stated that " James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it," and credited him with "creating a series of euphoric yet politically charged records that proved a massive influence on artists of all musical and cultural backgrounds". Crawdaddy! has credited him as the founder of the "progressive soul" movement.
Buy books on Amazon
Born in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, Stone mastere -
Cameron McWhirter
Cameron McWhirter is a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal. He was awarded a Nieman Foundation Fellowship for Journalism at Harvard in 2007. He lives in Atlanta, Georgia. "
Buy books on Amazon -
-
Luis Valdez
Luis Valdez is an American playwright, writer and film director.
Buy books on Amazon
He is regarded as the father of Chicano theater in the United States. -
Frank B. Wilderson III
Frank B Wilderson III is an American writer, dramatist, filmmaker and critic. He is a full professor of drama and African American studies at the University of California, Irvine.
Buy books on Amazon -
Charles E. Cobb Jr.
This in-depth look at the civil rights movement goes to the places where pioneers of the movement marched, sat-in at lunch counters, gathered in churches; where they spoke, taught, and organized; where they were arrested, where they lost their lives, and where they triumphed.
Buy books on Amazon
Award-winning journalist Charles E. Cobb Jr., a former organizer and field secretary for SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), knows the journey intimately. He guides us through Washington, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee, back to the real grassroots of the movement. He pays tribute not only to the men and women etched into our national memory but to local people whose seemingly small con -
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange (pronounced En-toe-ZAHK-kay SHONG-gay) was an African-American playwright, performance artist, and writer who is best known for her Obie Award winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.
Buy books on Amazon
Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize. -
August Wilson
American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Fences in 1985 and for The Piano Lesson in 1987.
Buy books on Amazon
His literary legacy embraces the ten series and received twice for drama for The Pittsburgh Cycle . Each depicted the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience, set in different decade of the 20th century.
Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, in the hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bore Frederick August Kittel, Junior, the fourth of six children, to Frederick August Kittel, Senior, a German immigrant baker. From North Carolina, maternal grandmother of Wilson earlier sought a better life and walked to Pennsylvania. After his fifth year, his mother raised the childr -
Wynton Marsalis
Wynton Marsalis has been described as the most outstanding jazz artist and composer of his generation. He has helped propel jazz to the forefront of American culture through his brilliant performances, recordings, broadcasts, and compositions as well as through his leadership as the artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC). Wynton Marsalis is the music director of the world-renowned Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which spends more than half the year on tour. He also hosts the popular Jazz for Young People concerts and helped lead the effort to construct JALC's new home, Frederick P. Rose Hall, the first education, performance, and broadcast facility devoted to jazz, which opened in October 2004.
Buy books on Amazon
Wynton Marsalis was born in New Orle -
Robert Franklin Williams
Robert Franklin Williams was a civil rights leader, author, and key figure in promoting both integration and armed Black self-defense in the United States.
Buy books on Amazon
After a stint in the army during WWII, Williams returned to his hometown in Monroe, North Carolina where he built a uniquely militant NAACP chapter and attracted international attention to racist hypocrisy. When eventually forced by the KKK and an FBI dragnet to flee the U.S. with his family in 1961, he found safe harbor in revolutionary Cuba, where he produced Radio Free Dixie, a program of politics and music broadcast to America.
In 1965, he and his wife left Cuba to settle in China where he was well received. He lived comfortably there and associated with higher functionaries of the Ch -
-
Gerri Hirshey
Gerri Hirshey is a journalist and author with 25 years of experience in newspapers, magazines and book publishing. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and many more.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
Ahmir Khalib Thompson, known professionally as ?uestlove or Questlove (also known as BROther ?uestion, Questo, Brother Question or Qlove), is an American drummer, DJ, music journalist and record producer.
Buy books on Amazon
He is best known as the drummer and joint frontman (with Black Thought) for the Grammy Award-winning band The Roots, serving since February 17, 2014 as the in-house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the same role he and the band served during the entire 969 episode run of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
He has produced for artists including Elvis Costello, Common, D'Angelo, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Jay-Z, Nikka Costa and more recently, Al Green, Amy Winehouse and John Legend. He is a member of the production teams the So -
Jeff Chang
Jeff Chang is a writer, host, and a cultural organizer known for his work in culture, politics, the arts, and music.
Buy books on Amazon
His cultural biography of Bruce Lee called Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America (Mariner) will be published on September 23, 2025. He is the host of the Signal Award-winning podcast on artists and ideas, Edge of Reason, produced by Atlantic: Rethink and Hauser & Wirth, and of Notes From the Edge, produced by KALW Public Media.
His first book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, garnered many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Slate named it one of the best nonfiction books of the past 25 years. Powell’s’ Books chose it as one of their -
-
Ashley Kahn
Ashley Kahn is an American music historian, journalist, and producer.
Buy books on Amazon -
Frank Hauser
FRANK HAUSER is a retired freelance director living in London. Born
Buy books on Amazon
in Wales in 1922, he attended Oxford University during the 1940s; worked as a
drama producer for the BBC; and, in 1956, formed the Meadow Players at Oxford.
He was Director of the Oxford Playhouse for seventeen years and directed
frequently in London and New York. In 1968, he received the award of Commander
of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.). -
Charles Lane
Charles Lane is a Washington Post editorial board member and op-ed columnist. A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in editorial writing, he was the Post's Supreme Court correspondent prior to joining the editorial board. As editor of The New Republic, he took action against the journalistic fraud of Stephen Glass, events recounted in the 2003 film Shattered Glass. He has also worked as a foreign correspondent in Europe and Latin America. He is the author of two previous books.
Buy books on Amazon -
Asa G. Hilliard III
Asa Grant Hilliard III (August 22, 1933 – August 13, 2007) was an African-American professor of educational psychology who worked on indigenous ancient African history (ancient Egyptian), culture, education and society. He was the Fuller E. Callaway Professor of Urban Education at Georgia State University, with joint appointments in the Department of Educational Policy Studies and the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education.
Buy books on Amazon -
Marsha Norman
Marsha Norman is an American playwright, screenwriter, and novelist. She received the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play 'night, Mother. She wrote the book and lyrics for such Broadway musicals as The Secret Garden, for which she won a Tony Award and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Book of a Musical, and The Red Shoes, as well as the libretto for the musical The Color Purple and the book for the musical The Bridges of Madison County. She was co-chair of the playwriting department at The Juilliard School until stepping down in 2020.
Buy books on Amazon -
Margarita Barresi
A native Puerto Rican, Margarita Barresi writes historical fiction and essays about growing up on the island. She studied public relations at Boston University and had a successful 25-year career in marketing communications. Her work has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Acentos Review, The Drowning Gull, and (mac)ro(mic).
Buy books on Amazon
Margarita lives in the suburbs north of Boston with her husband and two post-Maria rescue cats from Puerto Rico. -
Michael C. Reed
I'm a foundational black american. My grandparents on both sides of my family came from Tennessee. I grew up on the south side of Chicago. My heart still resides there. My body has moved to Bloomington, IL. I grew up a blerd reading comic books and devouring science fiction. I was one of those kids who hung out at the library when life got too rough for me. I could always lose myself in a book. I was also a big fan of sports and music. My sports hero was the late great Walter Payton.
Buy books on Amazon
I've always had a love affair with the written word. I worked in independent bookstores for 15 years of my life. I worked in my college library before that. No matter what else I did I always found my way back to literature. At some point I stopped fighting myse -
Farah Jasmine Griffin
Farah Jasmine Griffin is a professor of English and comparative literature and African American Studies at Columbia University, where she has served as director of the Institute for Research in African American studies.
Buy books on Amazon
In addition to editing several collections of letters and essays she is the author of Who Set You Flowin’: The African American Migration Narrative (Oxford, 1995), If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (Free Press, 2001) and Clawing At the Limits of Cool: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and the Greatest Jazz Collaboration Ever (Thomas Dunne, 2008). She is also the editor of Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends: Letters from Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus (Knopf, 1999) co-editor, with Cheryl Fish, of Strang -
Na'im Akbar
Dr. Na'im Akbar has been acclaimed by Essence Magazine as "one of the world's preeminent Psychologists and a pioneer in the development of an African-centered approach in modern psychology." Akbar has served as Associate Professor at Norfolk State University, was Chairman of the Morehouse College Psychology Department and is currently on the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Florida. . He has served on the Boards of Directors of a variety of important civic and professional organizations, including several terms on the Board of the National Association of Black Psychologists, which he was elected president in 1987. He has served on the editorial board of the Journal of Black Studies and for
Buy books on Amazon -
Dean Mafako
Dean Mafako, M.D. is an author, physician, and clinical professor of pediatrics with over 15 years of clinical and research experience. He is passionate about medicine and helping others, but also enjoys writing fiction and nonfiction novels. He writes to help others who may be dealing with difficult and traumatic life experiences to show them how their struggles can lead to personal growth and spiritual healing.
Buy books on Amazon -
Margarita Barresi
A native Puerto Rican, Margarita Barresi writes historical fiction and essays about growing up on the island. She studied public relations at Boston University and had a successful 25-year career in marketing communications. Her work has been published in several journals and anthologies, including Acentos Review, The Drowning Gull, and (mac)ro(mic).
Buy books on Amazon
Margarita lives in the suburbs north of Boston with her husband and two post-Maria rescue cats from Puerto Rico. -
Candace Owens
Candace Owens is an American conservative commentator and political activist. She is known for her pro-Trump activism and her criticism of Black Lives Matter and of the Democratic Party. In October 2018, Owens launched the Blexit movement, a campaign to encourage African Americans to abandon the Democratic Party. She worked for the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA between 2017 and 2019. She hosts the Candace Owens Show on PragerU's YouTube channel.
Buy books on Amazon -
Sly Stone
Sylvester Stewart, better known by his stage name Sly Stone, was an American musician, songwriter, and record producer. He was the frontman of Sly and the Family Stone, playing a critical role in the development of funk with his pioneering fusion of soul, rock, psychedelia, and gospel in the 1960s and 1970s. AllMusic stated that " James Brown may have invented funk, but Sly Stone perfected it," and credited him with "creating a series of euphoric yet politically charged records that proved a massive influence on artists of all musical and cultural backgrounds". Crawdaddy! has credited him as the founder of the "progressive soul" movement.
Buy books on Amazon
Born in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, Stone mastere -
Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson
Ahmir Khalib Thompson, known professionally as ?uestlove or Questlove (also known as BROther ?uestion, Questo, Brother Question or Qlove), is an American drummer, DJ, music journalist and record producer.
Buy books on Amazon
He is best known as the drummer and joint frontman (with Black Thought) for the Grammy Award-winning band The Roots, serving since February 17, 2014 as the in-house band for The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, the same role he and the band served during the entire 969 episode run of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.
He has produced for artists including Elvis Costello, Common, D'Angelo, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Bilal, Jay-Z, Nikka Costa and more recently, Al Green, Amy Winehouse and John Legend. He is a member of the production teams the So -
Chester Himes
Chester Bomar Himes began writing in the early 1930s while serving a prison sentence for armed robbery. From there, he produced short stories for periodicals such as Esquire and Abbott's Monthly. When released, he focussed on semi-autobiographical protest novels.
Buy books on Amazon
In 1953, Himes emigrated to France, where he was approached by Marcel Duhamel of Gallimard to write a detective series for Série Noire, which had published works from the likes of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and Jim Thompson. Himes would be the first black author included in the series. The resulting Harlem Cycle gained him celebrity when he won France's Grand Prix de Littérature Policière for La Reine des Pommes (now known in English as A Rage in Harlem) in 1958. Three of t -
Lesley Glaister
Novelist Lesley Glaister was born in Wellingborough, Northamptonshire, England. She grew up in Suffolk, moving to Sheffield with her first husband, where she took a degree with the Open University. She was 'discovered' by the novelist Hilary Mantel when she attended a course given by the Arvon Foundation in 1989. Mantel was so impressed by her writing that she recommended her to her own literary agent.
Buy books on Amazon
Lesley Glaister's first novel, Honour Thy Father (1990), won both a Somerset Maugham Award and a Betty Trask Award. Her other novels include Trick or Treat (1991), Limestone and Clay (1993), for which she was awarded the Yorkshire Post Book Award (Yorkshire Author of the Year), Partial Eclipse (1994) and The Private Parts of Women (1996), Now -
Alice Childress
Alice Childress (October 12, 1916 – August 14, 1994) was an American playwright, actor, and author.
Buy books on Amazon
She took odd jobs to pay for herself, including domestic worker, photo retoucher, assistant machinist, saleslady, and insurance agent. In 1939, she studied Drama in the American Negro Theatre (ANT), and performed there for 11 years. She acted in Abram Hill and John Silvera's On Strivers Row (1940), Theodore Brown's Natural Man (1941), and Philip Yordan's Anna Lucasta (1944). There she won acclaim as an actress in numerous other productions, and moved to Broadway with the transfer of ANT's hit comedy Anna Lucasta, which became the longest-running all-black play in Broadway history. Alice also became involved in social causes. She formed an off- -
Suzan-Lori Parks
Suzan-Lori Parks is an award-winning American playwright and screenwriter. She was a recipient of the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant in 2001, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2002. She is married to blues musician Paul Oscher.
Buy books on Amazon -
Stella Gibbons
Stella Dorothea Gibbons was an English novelist, journalist, poet and short-story writer.
Buy books on Amazon
Her first novel, Cold Comfort Farm, won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize for 1933. A satire and parody of the pessimistic ruralism of Thomas Hardy, his followers and especially Precious Bain by Mary Webb -the "loam and lovechild" genre, as some called it, Cold Comfort Farm introduces a self-confident young woman, quite self-consciously modern, pragmatic and optimistic, into the grim, fate-bound and dark rural scene those novelists tended to portray. -
Gerri Hirshey
Gerri Hirshey is a journalist and author with 25 years of experience in newspapers, magazines and book publishing. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Esquire, GQ, and many more.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ntozake Shange
Ntozake Shange (pronounced En-toe-ZAHK-kay SHONG-gay) was an African-American playwright, performance artist, and writer who is best known for her Obie Award winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf.
Buy books on Amazon
Among her honors and awards are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize. -
Jeff Chang
Jeff Chang is a writer, host, and a cultural organizer known for his work in culture, politics, the arts, and music.
Buy books on Amazon
His cultural biography of Bruce Lee called Water Mirror Echo: Bruce Lee and the Making of Asian America (Mariner) will be published on September 23, 2025. He is the host of the Signal Award-winning podcast on artists and ideas, Edge of Reason, produced by Atlantic: Rethink and Hauser & Wirth, and of Notes From the Edge, produced by KALW Public Media.
His first book, Can't Stop Won't Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, garnered many honors, including the American Book Award and the Asian American Literary Award. Slate named it one of the best nonfiction books of the past 25 years. Powell’s’ Books chose it as one of their -
Jean Toomer
Jean Toomer (December 26, 1894 – March 30, 1967) was an American poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and modernism. His first book Cane, published in 1923, is considered by many to be his most significant. Of mixed race and majority European ancestry, Toomer struggled to identify as "an American" and resisted efforts to classify him as a black writer.
Buy books on Amazon
He continued to write poetry, short stories and essays. After his second marriage in 1934, he moved from New York to Doylestown, Pennsylvania, where he became a member of the Religious Society of Friends (also known as Quakers) and retired from public life. His papers are held by the Beinecke Rare Book Library at Yale University.
(from Wikipedia) -
Francis Davis
Francis Davis was an American author and journalist. He was best known as the jazz critic for The Village Voice, and a contributing editor for The Atlantic Monthly. He had also worked in radio and film, and taught courses on Jazz and Blues at the University of Pennsylvania. He was a 1994 recipient of the Pew Fellowships in the Arts.
Buy books on Amazon -
August Wilson
American playwright August Wilson won a Pulitzer Prize for Fences in 1985 and for The Piano Lesson in 1987.
Buy books on Amazon
His literary legacy embraces the ten series and received twice for drama for The Pittsburgh Cycle . Each depicted the comic and tragic aspects of the African-American experience, set in different decade of the 20th century.
Daisy Wilson, an African American cleaning woman from North Carolina, in the hill district of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, bore Frederick August Kittel, Junior, the fourth of six children, to Frederick August Kittel, Senior, a German immigrant baker. From North Carolina, maternal grandmother of Wilson earlier sought a better life and walked to Pennsylvania. After his fifth year, his mother raised the childr -
Nelson George
Nelson George is an author, filmmaker, television producer, and critic with a long career in analyzing and presenting the diverse elements of African-American culture.
Buy books on Amazon
Queen Latifah won the Golden Globe for playing the lead in his directorial debut, the HBO movie 'Life Support'. The critically acclaimed drama looked at the effects of HIV on a troubled black family in his native Brooklyn, New York. He recently co-edited, with Alan Leeds, 'The James Brown Reader (Plume)', a collection of previously published articles about the Godfather of Soul that date as far back the late '50s. Plume published the book in May '08.
He is an executive producer on two returning cable shows: the third season of BET's American Gangster and the fifth airing of VH1 -
Peter Guralnick
Peter Guralnick is an acclaimed American music critic, author, and screenwriter best known for his deeply researched works on the history of rock and roll. He earned a master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University and soon began writing about blues, country, soul, and early rock music. His two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, Last Train to Memphis and Careless Love, is considered a definitive account of the singer’s life. Guralnick also authored landmark biographies of Sam Cooke and Sam Phillips, earning praise from critics and musicians alike. He has written liner notes for legends like Jerry Lee Lewis and Charlie Rich, winning a Grammy for his notes on Sam Cooke Live at the Harlem Square Club. His documentary scripts in
Buy books on Amazon -
Lorraine Hansberry
Lorraine Vivian Hansberry was an American playwright and writer. She was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway. Her best-known work, the play A Raisin in the Sun, highlights the lives of black Americans in Chicago living under racial segregation. The title of the play was taken from the poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes: "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?" At the age of 29, she won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award – making her the first African-American dramatist, the fifth woman, and the youngest playwright to do so. Hansberry's family had struggled against segregation, challenging a restrictive covenant in the 1940 U.S. Supreme Court case Hansberry v.
Buy books on Amazon -
George Clinton
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Buy books on Amazon
George Clinton (born July 22, 1941) is an American singer, songwriter, bandleader, and music producer. He was the principal architect of P-Funk, the mastermind of the bands Parliament and Funkadelic during the 1970s and early 1980s, and launched a solo career in 1981. He has been cited as one of the foremost innovators of funk music, along with James Brown and Sly Stone. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997, alongside 15 other members of Parliament-Funkadelic. -
John Clellon Holmes
John Clellon Holmes, born in Holyoke Massachusetts, was an author, poet and professor, best known for his 1952 novel Go. Go is considered the first "Beat" novel, and depicted events in his life with friends Jack Kerouac, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg. He was often referred to as the "quiet Beat," and was one of Kerouac's closest friends. He also wrote what is considered the definitive jazz novel of the Beat Generation, The Horn.
Buy books on Amazon
Holmes was more an observer and documenter of beat characters like Ginsberg, Cassidy and Kerouac than one of them. He asked Ginsberg for "any and all information on your poetry and your visions" (shortly before Ginsberg's admission into hospital) saying that "I am interested in knowing also anything you may wish to -
Cornel West
Cornel Ronald West is an American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently a professor of Religion at Princeton. West says his intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, Marxism, pragmatism, transcendentalism, and Anton Chekhov.
Buy books on Amazon -
Yosef A.A. Ben-Jochannan
Also known as Dr. Ben, Yosef Alfredo Antonio Ben-Jochannan claimed to have been born on December 21, 1918 to a Beta Israel lawyer named Kriston Ben-Jochannan and a Puerto Rican Jewish midwife mother of Yemenite ancestry named Julia Matta-Cruz in Gondor, Ethiopia.
Buy books on Amazon
His formal education is elusive, and he was likely an autodidact, but he claimed it to have begun in Puerto Rico and continued in the Virgin Islands and in Brazil. Ben-Jochannan claimed to have earned a BS degree in Civil Engineering at the University of Puerto Rico, but the registrar has no record of his attendance. He claimed to have received doctoral degrees in Cultural Anthropology and Moorish History from the University of Havana and the University of Barcelona in Spain, but Ba -
Jeffrey Haas
Attorney Jeff Haas has spent his career working for justice. In 1969 he and three other lawyers set up the Peoples Law Office, whose clients included the Black Panthers, SDS, and other political activists. Haas went on to handle cases involving prisoners rights, police torture, and the wrongfully accused. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with his wife and children and continues to represent victims of police brutality.
Buy books on Amazon -
Paule Marshall
Paule Marshall was an American writer, best known for her 1959 debut novel Brown Girl, Brownstones.
Buy books on Amazon
Marshall was educated at Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955). She taught at Virginia Commonwealth University, the University of California, Berkeley, the Iowa Writers' Workshop, and Yale University before holding the Helen Gould Sheppard Chair of Literature and Culture at New York University. In 1993 she received an honorary L.H.D. from Bates College. She was a MacArthur Fellow anda past winner of the Dos Passos Prize for Literature. In 2009, She received the Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award. -
Charles Gordone
Charles Gordone was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Buy books on Amazon -
Tim Madigan
Tim wrote his first book in 1968 when he was eleven years old. Every week in the autumn of that year, he scribbled down his account of the latest University of Minnesota football game in a notebook. Sales were modest.
Buy books on Amazon
But a love of books, words and writing never left released him, leading from his small-town Minnesota upbringing to a career writing newspaper stories and eventually books that were more formally published and found slightly larger audiences.
After college at the University of North Dakota, Tim worked as a sportswriter at a small paper in that state. Then came the cop beat in Odessa, Texas, and feature writing at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. By the mid-1990s, Tim had become one of the most decorated newspaper reporters in recen -
Annie L. Burton
Annie L. Burton (born c. 1858) was an African American memoirist. She was born into slavery on a plantation near Clayton, Alabama. Her date of death is uncertain. Her life's story is captured in her 1909 autobiography Memories of Childhood's Slavery Days. In her autobiography Burton relates that the end of slavery not only signaled a time for African Americans to start a new life, but also a time to redefine their lives. "Burton's Memories details not only one woman's quest from slavery to physical freedom but also her journey from a proscribed role to the creation of own free identity."
Buy books on Amazon
(from Wikipedia) -
Kate Drumgoold
Kate Drumgoold was an American woman born into slavery around 1858 near Petersburg, Virginia. Her life is captured in her autobiography, A Slave Girl's Story, Being an Autobiography of Kate Drumgoold. It offers a message of racial uplift, faith, and education. "It is rare portrait of a former slave who moved between the highly urbanized environment of New York City and the rural South."
Buy books on Amazon
(from Wikipedia) -
Walter E. Williams
Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Dr. Walter E. Williams holds a B.A. in economics from California State University, Los Angeles, and M.A. and Ph.D. degrees in economics from UCLA. He also holds a Doctor of Humane Letters from Virginia Union University and Grove City College, Doctor of Laws from Washington and Jefferson College and Doctor Honoris Causa en Ciencias Sociales from Universidad Francisco Marroquin, in Guatemala, where he is also Professor Honorario.
Buy books on Amazon
Dr. Williams has served on the faculty of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, as John M. Olin Distinguished Professor of Economics, since 1980; from 1995 to 2001, he served as department chairman. He has also served on the faculties of Los Angeles City College, California -
Charles White
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Buy books on Amazon
This si Charles^^^^^^White. -
Alan Lomax
Alan Lomax was an American ethnomusicologist, best known for his numerous field recordings of folk music of the 20th century. He was also a musician himself, as well as a folklorist, archivist, writer, scholar, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker.
Buy books on Amazon -
Herbert George Gutman
A specialist in slavery and labor history, Herbert George Gutman was professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
Buy books on Amazon -
Shay Youngblood
Georgia born writer Shay Youngblood is author of the novels Black Girl in Paris and Soul Kiss (Riverhead Books) and a collection of short fiction, The Big Mama Stories (Firebrand Books). Her plays Amazing Grace, Shakin' the Mess Outta Misery and Talking Bones, (Dramatic Publishing Company), have been widely produced. Her other plays include Black Power Barbie and Communism Killed My Dog. She completed a radio play, Explain Me the Blues for WBGO Public Radio's Jazz Play Series, featuring Odetta and the music of Olu Dara. The recipient of numerous grants and awards including a Pushcart Prize for fiction, a Lorraine Hansberry Playwriting Award, an Edward Albee honoree, several NAACP Theater Awards, an Astraea Writers' Award for fiction and a 2
Buy books on Amazon -
Richmond Lattimore
Richmond Lattimore graduated from Dartmouth in 1926 and received an A.B. from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Christ Church in 1932. He took his Ph.D. from the University of Illinois in 1934.
Buy books on Amazon
He was an American poet and classicist known for his translations of the Greek classics, especially his versions of the Iliad and Odyssey, which are generally considered as among the best English translations available -
Craig Pospisil
Buy books on Amazon
CRAIG POSPISIL is author of MONTHS ON END, SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN, THE DUNES, LIFE IS SHORT, the collection CHOOSING SIDES, all published by Dramatists Play Service. He is multiple award-winning author, six time Heideman Award finalist, and received the Kennedy Center/American College Theatre Festival’s award for Excellence in Playwriting from the in January 2011.
MONTHS ON END had its world premiere at the Purple Rose Theater Company and has been produced around the country, as well as in Australia and Hong Kong. SOMEWHERE IN BETWEEN premiered at the Detroit Repertory Theater and has since had more than sixty productions, including ones in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Paris. THE DUNES was produced by the Gallery Players in Brooklyn, af -
Sheena C. Howard
Writer of fiction, non-fiction, film, comics and graphic novels | Howard University Alum | Eisner Award winner | Featured in Emmy nominated episode of State of the Arts | Appearances on BCC, ABC, PBS and more | All types of stories deserve to be told, and I'm here to tell them | Growth happens when you listen to the stories that make you uncomfortable and consume things that challenge what you think you know.
Buy books on Amazon