Gil Scott-Heron
Gilbert Scott Heron was born in 1949. His mother was a librarian and his father a soccer player from Jamaica. In his youth Heron displayed both sporting prowess and academic ability (he won a place at Pennsylvania Lincoln University, like his role model Langston Hughes, the Harlem Renaissance man). But he quit college after the first year to write his first novel, The Vulture (1970). While Heron was writing this the ferment of black politics and student radicalism was coming to a head, and his second novel The Nigger Factory (1972) reflects these developments.
Heron has been more adventurous in his work as a musician and rapper.
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Amanda Petrusich
Amanda Petrusich is the author of “Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records” (Scribner; 2014), “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music” (Faber and Faber; 2008), and “Pink Moon,” an installment in Continuum/Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 series. She is a contributing writer for Pitchfork and a contributing editor at The Oxford American, and her music and culture writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Spin, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. She has an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and teaches writing and criticism at NYU’s Gallatin School. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Val Wilmer
Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.
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John O'Brien
John O'Brien's first novel Leaving Las Vegas was published in 1990 and made into a film of the same name in 1995.
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His other three works were published posthumously.
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John O'Brien was born in 1960 and grew up in Cleveland, Ohio. He moved to Los Angeles in 1982 with his then-wife Lisa. During his lifetime, he was a busboy, file clerk, and coffee roaster, but writing was his true calling. He committed suicide in April 1994 at age thirty-three. His published fiction includes "Leaving Las Vegas," "The Assault on Tony's," and "Stripper Lessons."
"John O'Brien was a stunningly talented writer who created poetry from the most squalid materials."--Jay McInerney, author of "Bright Lights, Big City" -
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo was an Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator regarded as a key figure in Spanish-language and international literature. His best-known works, Ficciones (transl. Fictions) and El Aleph (transl. The Aleph), published in the 1940s, are collections of short stories exploring motifs such as dreams, labyrinths, chance, infinity, archives, mirrors, fictional writers and mythology. Borges's works have contributed to philosophical literature and the fantasy genre, and have had a major influence on the magic realist movement in 20th century Latin American literature.
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Born in Buenos Aires, Borges later moved with his family to Switzerland in 1914, where he studied at the Collège de Genèv -
Walt Whitman
Walter Whitman Jr. was an American poet, essayist, and journalist. He is considered one of the most influential poets in American literature. Whitman incorporated both transcendentalism and realism in his writings and is often called the father of free verse. His work was controversial in his time, particularly his 1855 poetry collection Leaves of Grass, which was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality.
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Whitman was born in Huntington on Long Island, and lived in Brooklyn as a child and through much of his career. At the age of 11, he left formal schooling to go to work. He worked as a journalist, a teacher, and a government clerk. Whitman's major poetry collection, Leaves of Grass, first published in 1855, was financed with hi -
Haruki Murakami
Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) is a Japanese writer. His novels, essays, and short stories have been best-sellers in Japan and internationally, with his work translated into 50 languages and having sold millions of copies outside Japan. He has received numerous awards for his work, including the Gunzo Prize for New Writers, the World Fantasy Award, the Tanizaki Prize, Yomiuri Prize for Literature, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, the Noma Literary Prize, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Kiriyama Prize for Fiction, the Goodreads Choice Awards for Best Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize, and the Princess of Asturias Awards.
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Growing up in Ashiya, near Kobe before moving to Tokyo to attend Waseda University, he published his first novel Hear the -
Kathy Acker
Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.
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Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidl -
Arthur Miller
Works of American playwright Arthur Asher Miller include Death of a Salesman (1949), for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Crucible (1953).
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This essayist, a prominent figure in literature and cinema for over 61 years, composed a wide variety, such as celebrated A View from the Bridge and All My Sons , still studied and performed worldwide. Miller often in the public eye most famously refused to give evidence to the un-American activities committee of the House of Representatives, received award for drama, and married Marilyn Monroe. People at the time considered the greatest Miller.
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Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (born Robert Allen Zimmerman) is an American singer-songwriter, author, musician, poet, and, of late, disc jockey who has been a major figure in popular music for five decades. Much of Dylan's most celebrated work dates from the 1960s, when he became an informal chronicler and a reluctant figurehead of American unrest. A number of his songs, such as "Blowin' in the Wind" and "The Times They Are a-Changin'", became anthems of the anti-war and civil rights movements. His most recent studio album, Modern Times, released on August 29, 2006, entered the U.S. album charts at #1, making him, at age sixty five, the oldest living person to top those charts.
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Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize in Literature (2016). -
Richard Wright
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an African-American author of powerful, sometimes controversial novels, short stories and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerned racial themes. His work helped redefine discussions of race relations in America in the mid-20th century.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
Elmore Leonard
Elmore John Leonard lived in Dallas, Oklahoma City and Memphis before settling in Detroit in 1935. After serving in the navy, he studied English literature at the University of Detroit where he entered a short story competition. His earliest published novels in the 1950s were westerns, but Leonard went on to specialize in crime fiction and suspense thrillers, many of which have been adapted into motion pictures.
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Father of Peter Leonard. -
Eric Idle
Eric Idle is an English comedian, actor, author and composer of comedic songs. He wrote and performed as a member of the internationally renowned British comedy group Monty Python.
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Sister Souljah
Sister Souljah (born Lisa Williamson) was born in 1964 in New York City. She attended Cornell University's advanced placement summer program and Spain's University of Salamanca study-abroad program. She later majored in American history and African studies at Rutgers University. Her travels and lectures have taken her all over America, Europe, and Africa. In the mid-1980s, she founded, in cooperation with the United Church of Christ, the African Youth Survival Camp, located in Enfield, North Carolina, for children of homeless families. In 1992, her rap album, 360 Degrees of Power, and video, "Slavery's Back in Effect," catapulted her to national attention. She lives in New York with her husband and son.
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Langston Hughes
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).
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People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
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Frantz Fanon
Frantz Fanon was a psychiatrist, philosopher, revolutionary, and author from Martinique. He was influential in the field of post-colonial studies and was perhaps the pre-eminent thinker of the 20th century on the issue of decolonization and the psychopathology of colonization. His works have inspired anti-colonial liberation movements for more than four decades.
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Assata Shakur
Assata Olugbala Shakur was a Black civil rights activist who was a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP) and Black Liberation Army (BLA).
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Between 1971 and 1973, Shakur was accused of several crimes, none of which had sufficient evidence to back them. However, knowing that she would not be able to prove her innocence, she escaped prison and fled to Cuba where she resided in political asylum. She is listed on the FBI Most Wanted Terrorist list.
For more information, do your own extensive research, bearing in mind that America is still very racist, bigoted, and micro-aggressive; therefore, not all sources are trustworthy. One of her most famous quotes is: “No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going -
Frank O'Hara
Collections of American poet Francis Russell O'Hara include Meditations in an Emergency (1957) and Lunch Poems (1964); playfulness, irony, sophistication, and a shared interest in the visual arts mark works of the New York School, an active group that included O'Hara during the 1950s and 1960s.
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Parents reared O'Hara in Grafton, Massachusetts. O'Hara served in the south Pacific and Japan as a sonar man on the destroyer United States Ship Nicholas during World War II.
With the funding, made available to veterans, he attended Harvard University and roomed with artist-writer Edward Gorey. He majored in music and composed some works despite his irregular attendance was and his disparate interests. Visual art and contemporary music, his fi -
Prince
Prince Rogers Nelson was an American singer, songwriter, musician, and actor.
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According to Robert Larsen in his book, History of Rock and Roll [2004], Prince is "one of the most talented and commercially successful pop musicians of the last twenty years", producing ten platinum albums and thirty Top 40 singles during his career. Prince founded his own recording studio and label, writing, self-producing and playing most, or all, of the instruments on his recordings. In addition, Prince has been a "talent promoter" for the careers of Sheila E, Carmen Electra, The Time and Vanity 6, as well as writing songs that became hits for other artists including Chaka Khan, The Bangles, and Sinéad O'Connor, making him one of the most successful artists i -
Tracy K. Smith
Tracy K. Smith is the author of Wade in the Water; Life on Mars, winner of the Pulitzer Prize; Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; and The Body’s Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize. She is also the editor of an anthology, American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time, and the author of a memoir, Ordinary Light, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. From 2017 to 2019, Smith served as Poet Laureate of the United States. She teaches at Princeton University.
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Lemn Sissay
Lemn Sissay OBE (born 21 May 1967), is a British author and broadcaster.
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Amanda Petrusich
Amanda Petrusich is the author of “Do Not Sell At Any Price: The Wild, Obsessive Hunt for the World’s Rarest 78rpm Records” (Scribner; 2014), “It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways, and the Search for the Next American Music” (Faber and Faber; 2008), and “Pink Moon,” an installment in Continuum/Bloomsbury’s acclaimed 33 1/3 series. She is a contributing writer for Pitchfork and a contributing editor at The Oxford American, and her music and culture writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Spin, BuzzFeed, and elsewhere. She has an M.F.A. in nonfiction writing from Columbia University and teaches writing and criticism at NYU’s Gallatin School. She lives in Brooklyn.
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Val Wilmer
Valerie Sybil Wilmer (born 7 December 1941) is a British photographer and writer specialising in jazz, gospel, blues, and British African-Caribbean music and culture.
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Staci Robinson
Staci Robinson is an author and screenwriter. Her previous projects and collaborations include the compilation Tupac Remembered: Bearing Witness to a Life and Legacy, the novel Interceptions, the film The Bounce Back, and the FX documentary series Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur. Robinson graduated from UCLA with a degree in history. She currently lives with her family in Northern California.
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Belinda Bauer
Belinda Bauer grew up in England and South Africa. She has worked as a journalist and screenwriter, and her script THE LOCKER ROOM earned her the Carl Foreman/Bafta Award for Young British Screenwriters, an award that was presented to her by Sidney Poitier. She was a runner-up in the Rhys Davies Short Story Competition for "Mysterious Ways," about a girl stranded on a desert island with 30,000 Bibles. Belinda now lives in Wales.
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Dan Charnas
Dan Charnas is the author of the definitive history of the hip-hop business, The Big Payback (NAL/Penguin). He’s also the author of Work Clean (Rodale/Harmony), a book detailing applying chefs’ techniques to almost any life situation. He was also the co-creator and executive producer of the VH1 movie and TV series, The Breaks. He lives in Manhattan, and is an associate professor at NYU/Tisch’s Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music.
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William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II, (also known by his pen name William Lee) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, painter, and spoken word performer.
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A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century".
His influence is considered to have affected a range of popular culture as well as literature. Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays.
Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. He also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearance -
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C.L.R. James
C. L. R. James (1901–1989), a Trinidadian historian, political activist, and writer, is the author of The Black Jacobins, an influential study of the Haitian Revolution and the classic book on sport and culture, Beyond a Boundary. His play Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History was recently discovered in the archives and published Duke University Press.
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J.G. Ballard
James Graham "J. G." Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Ballard came to be associated with the New Wave of science fiction early in his career with apocalyptic (or post-apocalyptic) novels such as The Drowned World (1962), The Burning World (1964), and The Crystal World (1966). In the late 1960s and early 1970s Ballard focused on an eclectic variety of short stories (or "condensed novels") such as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which drew closer comparison with the work of postmodernist writers such as William S. Burroughs. In 1973 the highly controversial novel Crash was published, a story about symphorophilia and car crash fetishism; the protagonist becomes sexually arous
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Jenifer Lewis
Jenifer Lewis is one of Hollywood’s most familiar faces, with more than 300 appearances in film and television. Dubbed a “national treasure” by TVGuide.com, Jenifer currently stars on the Emmy-nominated hit show “Black-ish,” where her hilarious portrayal of Ruby Johnson earned Jenifer a nomination for the 2018 Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actress in a TV comedy series.
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Jenifer’s bestselling memoir, The Mother of Black Hollywood, was named “2018 Book of the Year” at the National Book Club Convention and the audio version received an Earphones Award from AudioFile magazine.
As both an actress and an activist, Jenifer is a social media sensation. Her viral hits include For My Book, Get Your Ass Out and Vote!; Flint Ain’t Fixed; and -
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.
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Born in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, Stone mastere