Jeff Chang
Jeff Chang is a writer, host, and a cultural organizer known for his work in culture, politics, the arts, and music.
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
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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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 -
Guthrie P. Ramsey Jr.
Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. is the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Term Professor of Music at the University of Pennsylvania. A widely published writer, he is the author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (University of California Press, 2003). It was named outstanding book of the year by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music. He also has recently completed In Walked Bud: Earl “Bud” Powell and the Modern Jazz Challenge, which is forthcoming from the University of California Press. His next book, Who Hears Here?: Essays on Black Music History and Society, a mid-career collection of his essays is also forthcoming. He was recipient of the Lowens Award from the Society for American Music for best article on an Am
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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.
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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.
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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 -
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.
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Fat Joe
Joseph Antonio Cartagena, better known by his stage name Fat Joe, is a rapper, actor, and entrepreneur from the birthplace of hip-hop, the Bronx. He released his first solo album, Represent, in 1993, and founded the record label Terror Squad. Fat Joe is perhaps best known for his platinum-selling album Jealous Ones Still Envy (J.O.S.E.) and hits like “Lean Back” with Terror Squad, “What’s Luv?” featuring Ashanti and Ja Rule, and “All the Way Up” with Remy Ma, French Montana, and Dre.
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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 -
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.
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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. "
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W.E.B. Du Bois
In 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced 'doo-boyz') was born in Massachusetts. He attended Fisk College in Nashville, then earned his BA in 1890 and his MS in 1891 from Harvard. Du Bois studied at the University of Berlin, then earned his doctorate in history from Harvard in 1894. He taught economics and history at Atlanta University from 1897-1910. The Souls of Black Folk (1903) made his name, in which he urged black Americans to stand up for their educational and economic rights. Du Bois was a founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and edited the NAACP's official journal, "Crisis," from 1910 to 1934. Du Bois turned "Crisis" into the foremost black literary journal. The black nationalist ex
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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.
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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.
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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 -
Tupac Shakur
Tupac Amaru Shakur, also known by his stage names 2Pac and Makaveli, was an American rapper. In addition to his status as a top-selling recording artist, Shakur was a successful film actor and a prominent social activist. He is recognized in the Guinness Book of World Records as the highest-selling rap artist, with over 75,000,000 albums sold worldwide, including over 50,000,000 in the United States. Most of Shakur's songs are about growing up amid violence and hardship in ghettos, racism, problems in society and conflicts with other rappers. Shakur's work is known for advocating political, economic, social and racial equality, as well as his raw descriptions of violence, drug and alcohol abuse and conflicts with the law.
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Shakur was initiall -
Eminem
Marshall Bruce Mathers III, known as Slim Shady and his primary stage name Eminem, is an Academy Award-winning American rapper, record producer and actor. Having sold over seventy million albums worldwide, Eminem is one of the highest-selling rappers of all time.
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Eminem quickly gained popularity in 1999 with his major-label debut album The Slim Shady LP. The following album, The Marshall Mathers LP, became the fastest-selling hip hop album in history, followed by an increasing amount of popularity, critical praise, as well as controversy. While Eminem has won many Grammy Awards, been praised for having "verbal energy", high quality of lyricism and been ranked at number nine on MTV's list of The Greatest MCs of All Time, #13 on the MTV's "22 -
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.
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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 -
Robert Palmer
Robert Franklin Palmer Jr. was a 20th century American writer, musicologist, clarinetist, saxophonist, and blues producer. Robert Palmer is best known for books he authored such as Deep Blues, his music journalism articles for The New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine, his work producing blues recordings and the soundtrack to the film Deep Blues, and his clarinet work in the 1960s band The Insect Trust.
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-Wikipedia
Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
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 -
Kaveh Akbar
Kaveh Akbar's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, Tin House, PBS NewsHour, A Public Space, Guernica, Boston Review, and elsewhere. He is a recipient of a 2016 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation and the Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. He is also the founder and editor of Divedapper, a home for dialogues with vital voices in contemporary poetry.
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His first full-length collection, Calling a Wolf a Wolf, was published in 2017.
Kaveh was born in Tehran, Iran and currently lives in Iowa. He was a visiting professor at Purdue University in Indiana in Fall 2017. -
Hanif Abdurraqib
Hanif Abdurraqib is a poet, essayist, and cultural critic from Columbus, Ohio. His poetry has been published in Muzzle, Vinyl, PEN American, and various other journals. His essays and music criticism have been published in The FADER, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. His first full length poetry collection, The Crown Ain't Worth Much, was released in June 2016 from Button Poetry. It was named a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Prize, and was nominated for a Hurston-Wright Legacy Award. With Big Lucks, he released a limited edition chapbook, Vintage Sadness, in summer 2017 (you cannot get it anymore and he is very sorry.) His first collection of essays, They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us, was released in winter 2017 by T
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Fat Joe
Joseph Antonio Cartagena, better known by his stage name Fat Joe, is a rapper, actor, and entrepreneur from the birthplace of hip-hop, the Bronx. He released his first solo album, Represent, in 1993, and founded the record label Terror Squad. Fat Joe is perhaps best known for his platinum-selling album Jealous Ones Still Envy (J.O.S.E.) and hits like “Lean Back” with Terror Squad, “What’s Luv?” featuring Ashanti and Ja Rule, and “All the Way Up” with Remy Ma, French Montana, and Dre.
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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.
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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 -
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.
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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 -
Greg Tate
Greg Tate is a music and popular culture critic and journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, The Wire, and Downbeat. He is the author of Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, and the editor of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Tate, via guitar and baton, also leads the Conducted Improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber who tour internationally.
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Michael Azerrad
Michael Azerrad has written for a number of magazines, including Rolling Stone, Revolver, and Spin. He lives in New York City.
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bell hooks
bell hooks (deliberately in lower-case; born Gloria Jean Watkins) was an African-American author, feminist, and social activist. Her writing focused on the interconnectivity of race, class, and gender and their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and domination. She published over thirty books and numerous scholarly and mainstream articles, appeared in several documentary films and participated in various public lectures. Primarily through a postmodern female perspective, she addressed race, class, and gender in education, art, history, sexuality, mass media and feminism.
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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.
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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
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Michelle Lindo-Rice
Michelle Lindo-Rice is the bestselling author of the "Able to Love" and "On The Right Path" series, an Emma Award Winner and a Vivian Award finalist. Michelle enjoys reading and crafting fiction across genres. Originally from Jamaica West Indies, she has earned degrees from New York University, SUNY at Stony Brook, Teachers College Columbia University, Argosy University and has been educator for over 20 years.
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Ben Westhoff
Ben Westhoff's new book Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search For the Truth (May 24, 2022, Hachette Books) is a true crime memoir detailing his investigation into the unsolved killing of Jorell Cleveland, Westhoff's mentee in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program for 11 years. His previous book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Atlantic) is the highly-acclaimed, bombshell first book about fentanyl, which is causing the worst drug crisis in American history. It has received glowing reviews, was included on many year-end best lists, and Westhoff was featured on NPR's Fresh Air and Joe Rogan's podcast. He now speaks around the country about the fentanyl crisis, and has advise
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Robin D.G. Kelley
Robin Davis Gibran Kelley is an American historian and academic, who is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
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Dawoud Bey
Dawoud Bey (New York, 1953) has for decades made groundbreaking and evocative work about the histories of Black communities. His numerous honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. A major career retrospective of his work, An American Project, was co-organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2020–22). Bey holds a master of fine arts degree from Yale University School of Art and is currently professor of art and a former Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago, where he has taught since 1998. His books include Class Pictures (Aperture, 2007), Seeing Deeply (2018), Dawoud Bey on Photographing People and Commun
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Imani Perry
Imani Perry, a professor of African American studies at Princeton, first appeared in print at age 3 in the Birmingham (Alabama) News in a photo of her and her parents at a protest against police brutality. She has published widely on topics ranging from racial inequality to hip-hop and is active across various media. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a bachelor's degree from Yale University.
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(from http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/ar...) -
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.
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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 -
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. "
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George Clinton
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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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. -
Michelle Alexander
Michelle Alexander is an associate professor of law at The Ohio State University, a civil rights advocate and a writer.
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Amiri Baraka
Poems and plays, such as Dutchman (1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
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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 -
Ross Gay
Ross Gay is an American poet, essayist, and professor who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
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His honors include being a Cave Canem Workshop fellow and a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Tuition Scholar, and he received a grant from the Pennsylvania Council of the Arts.
He is an associate professor of poetry at Indiana University and teaches in Drew University’s low-residency MFA program in poetry. He also serves on the board of the Bloomington Community Orchard. -
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 -
Ben Westhoff
Ben Westhoff's new book Little Brother: Love, Tragedy, and My Search For the Truth (May 24, 2022, Hachette Books) is a true crime memoir detailing his investigation into the unsolved killing of Jorell Cleveland, Westhoff's mentee in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program for 11 years. His previous book Fentanyl, Inc.: How Rogue Chemists Are Creating the Deadliest Wave of the Opioid Epidemic (Grove Atlantic) is the highly-acclaimed, bombshell first book about fentanyl, which is causing the worst drug crisis in American history. It has received glowing reviews, was included on many year-end best lists, and Westhoff was featured on NPR's Fresh Air and Joe Rogan's podcast. He now speaks around the country about the fentanyl crisis, and has advise
Buy books on Amazon -
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.
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Amiri Baraka
Poems and plays, such as Dutchman (1964), of American writer Amiri Baraka originally Everett LeRoi Jones focus on racial conflict.
Buy books on Amazon
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 -
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.
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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 -
Greg Tate
Greg Tate is a music and popular culture critic and journalist whose work has appeared in many publications, including the Village Voice, Vibe, Spin, The Wire, and Downbeat. He is the author of Flyboy 2: The Greg Tate Reader, Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America, and Midnight Lightning: Jimi Hendrix and the Black Experience, and the editor of Everything But the Burden: What White People Are Taking from Black Culture. Tate, via guitar and baton, also leads the Conducted Improvisation ensemble Burnt Sugar The Arkestra Chamber who tour internationally.
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George Clinton
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
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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. -
Wes Moore
Westley Watende Omari Moore (born October 15, 1978) is an American politician, investment banker, author, television producer, and nonprofit executive serving as the 63rd governor of Maryland since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, he is the first Black governor of the state, the third Black person elected as governor of any U.S. state, and as of 2023, the only incumbent black governor of any U.S. state.
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Born in Maryland and raised largely in New York, Moore graduated from Johns Hopkins University and received a master's degree from Wolfson College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After several years in the U.S. Army and Army Reserve, Moore became an investment banker in New York. Between 2010 and 2015, Moore published five books, includin -
Ed Piskor
Ed Piskor had been cartooning professionally in print form since 2005, starting off drawing American Splendor comics written by Harvey Pekar. The duo continued working together on 2 graphic novels, Macedonia, and The Beats. Ed began self publishing Wizzywig after developing a huge interest in the history of Hacking and Phone Phreaking. 3 volumes, making up 3/4 of the full story, have been published to date.
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Recently Ed had designed the characters for the new Adult Swim series, Mongo Wrestling Alliance. -
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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Jill Scott
Jill Scott is an American soul and R&B singer-songwriter, poet, and actress. In 2007, Scott made her cinematic debut in the films Hounddog (as Big Mama Thornton) and in Tyler Perry's feature film, Why Did I Get Married? That same year her third studio album, The Real Thing: Words and Sounds Vol. 3, was released on September 25, 2007. She has won three Grammy Awards. She currently appears in the lead role of the BBC/HBO series The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency.
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The RZA
Robert Fitzgerald Diggs, better known by his stage name RZA, is an American music producer, multi-instrumentalist, author, rapper, actor, director, composer, and screenwriter. A prominent figure in hip hop, RZA is the de facto leader of the Wu-Tang Clan. He has produced almost all of Wu-Tang Clan's albums as well as many Wu-Tang solo and affiliate projects. He is a cousin of the late band-mate, Ol' Dirty Bastard and The GZA (who also formed the group with RZA). He has also released solo albums under the alter-ego Bobby Digital, along with executive producing credits for side projects. In addition to the Wu-Tang Clan and his solo releases, RZA was also a founding member of the horrorcore Hip Hop group Gravediggaz where he used the name The R
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Quincy Troupe
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician.
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Shirley Graham du Bois
One of six children, and the only daughter among them, of an African Methodist Episcopal minister. She moved around often, graduating from Lewis and Clark HS in Spokane, WA in 1915, studied music composition at the Sorbonne in Paris in the 1920s and received her BA at Oberlin College in the 1930s. She had two husbands, including author and activist W.E.B. du Bois. She and du Bois emigrated to Ghana in the 1960s but, after his death, a military coup forced her to move to Cairo, Egypt. In addition to her literature, she also composed a number of musical scores including an opera that premiered in Cleveland, OH, attracting 10,000 people on its opening night.
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Married to W.E.B. Du Bois -
Dempsey J. Travis
Dempsey J. Travis was an entrepreneur, historian and self-made multi-millionaire. He was the president of Travis Realty Company®, which has been listed among the Largest 100 Black Business in America by Black Enterprise Magazine. Mr. Travis was also listed for seven years in Ebony Magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential Black Americans and as Black Businessman of the Year by Dollar and Sense Magazine.
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Mr. Travis authored 25 best selling books including An Autobiography of Black Chicago, An Autobiography of Black Politics, Real Estate is the Gold in Your Future, and, Harold: The People’s Mayor, to name a few titles. His last book before his death was "Obama's Race to the White House." An autobiography was in process at the time of his de -
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.
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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.
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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 -
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.
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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 -
Rita Dove
Rita Dove, former U.S. Poet Laureate, Pulitzer Prize winner, and musician, lives in Charlottesville, where she is Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.
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James D. Anderson
James D. Anderson is dean of the College of Education, the Edward William and Jane Marr Gutgsell Professor of Education, and affiliate professor of History, African American Studies, and College of Law at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
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His scholarship focuses broadly on the history of U.S. education, with a subfield on the history of African American education. His book, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935, won the American Educational Research Association outstanding book award in 1990. Anderson was elected to the National Academy of Education in 2008.
In 2012, he was selected as a Fellow for Outstanding Research by the AERA and received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Association of Colleges for Te -
Marc Weidenbaum
Marc Weidenbaum founded the website Disquiet.com in 1996. It focuses on the intersection of sound, art, and technology. He's currently writing a book for the 33 1/3 series about Aphex Twin's 1994 album, Selected Ambient Works Vol II. He has written for Nature, the website of The Atlantic, Boing Boing, Down Beat, and numerous other publications. He has commissioned and curated sound/music projects that have featured original works by Kate Carr, Marcus Fischer, Marielle Jakobsons, John Kannenberg, Tom Moody, Steve Roden, Scanner, Roddy Shrock, Robert Thomas, Pedro Tudela, and Stephen Vitiello, among many others. He moderates the Disquiet Junto group at Soundcloud.com; there dozens of musicians respond to weekly Oulipo-style restrictive compos
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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.
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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.
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Lawrence W. Levine
Lawrence William Levine was a celebrated American historian. He was born in Manhattan and died in Berkeley, California.
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A model of the engaged scholar throughout his life, Levine lived both his scholarship and his politics. From the very outset, he immersed himself in the political life of Berkeley – in, for example, a sleep-in in the rotunda of the state capitol in Sacramento to press for fair housing legislation, and the sit-ins in Berkeley organized by CORE to force stores to hire black people.
He participated in the march from Selma to Montgomery, expressing his solidarity with the civil rights movement. During the Free Speech upheaval at Berkeley, he came to the defense of students protesting a ban on political activity on campus in sup -
Timuel D. Black Jr.
Timuel Dixon Black Jr. was an American educator, civil rights activist, historian and author. A native of Alabama, Black was raised in Chicago, Illinois and studied the city's African American history.
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Kevin Coval
Kevin Coval is an award-winning poet & author of Everything Must Go: The Life & Death of an American Neighborhood, A People's History of Chicago & over ten other full-length collections, anthologies & chapbooks. He is the founding editor of The BreakBeat Poets series on Haymarket Books, & Artistic Director of the MacArthur Award-winning cultural organization, Young Chicago Authors, & founder of Louder Than a Bomb: The Chicago Youth Poetry Festival, the world's largest youth poetry festival, now in more than 19 cities across North America. He's shared the stage with The Migos & Nelson Mandela, has published in Poetry Magazine, The Chicago Tribune & CNN.com & co-hosts the podcast, The Cornerstore, on WGN Radio.
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Tricia Rose
She graduated from Yale University where she received a BA in Sociology and then received her Ph.D. from Brown University in the field of American Studies. She has taught at NYU, University of California at Santa Cruz and is now a Professor of Africana Studies at Brown University.
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Professor Rose is most well-known for her ground-breaking book on the emergence of hip hop culture. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, published in 1994 by Wesleyan Press, has since become a classic. It is considered a foundational text for the study of hip hop, one that has defined what has eventually become a serious field of study. Black Noise won an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 1995 and was also cons -
Mark Bauerlein
Mark Bauerlein earned his doctorate in English at UCLA in 1988. He has taught at Emory since 1989, with a two-and-a-half year break in 2003-05 to serve as the Director, Office of Research and Analysis, at the National Endowment for the Arts. Apart from his scholarly work, he publishes in popular periodicals such as The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Washington Post, TLS, and Chronicle of Higher Education. His latest book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future; Or, Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 (www.dumbestgeneration.com), was published in May 2008.
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