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).
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."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto...
If you like author Langston Hughes here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (93)
-
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Jimmy Santiago Baca of Apache and Chicano descent is an American poet and writer.
Buy books on Amazon -
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- -
Joan Naviyuk Kane
Joan Naviyuk Kane is an Inupiaq American poet. She is 2014 Indigenous Writer-in-Residence at the School for Advanced Research.
Buy books on Amazon
Joan Kane is Inupiaq Eskimo, with family from King Island and Mary's Igloo, Alaska. She graduated from Harvard College and from Columbia University with an M.F.A.
She lives in Anchorage, Alaska with her husband and sons. -
Zora Neale Hurston
Novels, including Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and nonfiction writings of American folklorist Zora Neale Hurston give detailed accounts of African American life in the South.
Buy books on Amazon
In 1925, Hurston, one of the leaders of the literary renaissance, happening in Harlem, produced the short-lived literary magazine Fire!! alongside Langston Hughes and Wallace Thurman shortly before she entered Barnard College. This literary movement developed into the Harlem renaissance.
Hurston applied her Barnard ethnographic training to document African American folklore in her critically acclaimed book Mules and Men alongside fiction Their Eyes Were Watching God . She also assembled a folk-based performance dance group that recreated her Southern t -
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.
Buy books on Amazon
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 -
Mary Oliver
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.
Buy books on Amazon
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
Buy books on Amazon
She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership -
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 -
Alice Walker
Noted American writer Alice Walker won a Pulitzer Prize for her stance against racism and sexism in such novels as The Color Purple (1982).
Buy books on Amazon
People awarded this preeminent author of stories, essays, and poetry of the United States. In 1983, this first African woman for fiction also received the national book award. Her other books include The Third Life of Grange Copeland , Meridian , The Temple of My Familiar , and Possessing the Secret of Joy . In public life, Walker worked to address problems of injustice, inequality, and poverty as an activist, teacher, and public intellectual. -
Israel Horovitz
Israel Horovitz has written more than 80 plays, several of which have been translated into as many as 30 languages and performed worldwide. His play Line reached 50 years of continuous performance, off-Broadway, at 13th Street Repertory Theatre.
Buy books on Amazon
Horovitz is Founding Artistic Director of Gloucester Stage Company, and of the New York Playwrights Lab. For two decades, he taught a bilingual screenwriting workshop with writers from la Fémis, France’s national film school, and Columbia University’s graduate film program. Has also written or adapted numerous plays for BBC Radio. (Click on link for listing and description of plays.)
He is married to Gillian Adams-Horovitz, former British National Marathon Champion and Record holder, and former USA Tr -
Brad Aaron Modlin
Brad Aaron Modlin is the author of EVERYONE AT THIS PARTY HAS TWO NAMES, which won the Cowles Poetry Prize, and SURVIVING IN DROUGHT (short stories) which won the Cupboard Contest. He is The Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing at University of Nebraska Kearney, where he teaches undergrad and grad students, curates the visiting writers series, and gets chalk all over himself.
Buy books on Amazon
His work has been the basis for orchestral scores, art exhibitions, and the first episode of the Poetry Unbound podcast from On Being Studios. (The poem "What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.") He collaborates with other artists and likes learning from new people. When he gives readings in person, he remembers to pack comfortable shoes. Over -
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. -
Lucille Fletcher
Lucille Fletcher is best known for her suspense classic Sorry, Wrong Number, originally a radio play, later a novel, TV play and motion picture. She has written extensively for both screen and television, and is the author of several successful mystery novels, including Blindfold, . . . And Presumed Dead, The Strange Blue Yawl and The Girl in Cabin B54. She is the author of the recently successful Broadway play Night Watch, which was also a motion picture starring Elizabeth Taylor. A native of Brooklyn and a graduate of Vassar College, Lucille Fletcher lived on the eastern shore of Maryland with her husband, novelist Douglass Wallop, until his death in 1985.
Buy books on Amazon
This author bio was adapted from the bio on the dust jacket of an Eighty Dollars to -
Jessie Redmon Fauset
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an American editor, poet, essayist and novelist.
Buy books on Amazon
Fauset was born in Fredericksville, an all-black hamlet in Camden County, New Jersey, also known as Free Haven (now incorporated into the borough of Lawnside, New Jersey). She was the daughter of Anna "Annie" Seamon and Redmon Fauset, a Presbyterian minister. Her mother died when she was still a young girl. Her father remarried Bella Huff (a white woman), and they had three children, including civil rights activist and folklorist Arthur Fauset (1899–1983).
Fauset attended Philadelphia High School for girls, and graduated as the only African American in her class. After high school Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, and is believed to be the second black w -
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.
Buy books on Amazon
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 -
Lucia M. Gonzalez
Has fond memories of listening to storytellers while growing up in Cuba. Was previously a translator and is now a children's librarian, a storyteller, and a puppeteer. Lives in Miami Florida with her Venezuelan husband and their bilingual daughter, Anna.
Buy books on Amazon -
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda, born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in 1904 in Parral, Chile, was a poet, diplomat, and politician, widely considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. From an early age, he showed a deep passion for poetry, publishing his first works as a teenager. He adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda to avoid disapproval from his father, who discouraged his literary ambitions. His breakthrough came with Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924), a collection of deeply emotional and sensual poetry that gained international recognition and remains one of his most celebrated works.
Buy books on Amazon
Neruda’s career took him beyond literature into diplomacy, a path that a -
George S. Schuyler
(1895–1977), satirist, critic, and journalist. George Samuel Schuyler was born in Providence, Rhode Island, to Eliza Jane Fischer and George S. Schuyler. He grew up in a middle-class, racially mixed neighborhood in Syracuse, New York, where he attended public schools until he enlisted in the army at the age of seventeen. He spent seven years (1912–1919) with the black 25th U.S. Infantry and was discharged as a first lieutenant.
Buy books on Amazon
From early on, Schuyler possessed a high level of confidence and boasted of his family having been free as far back as the Revolutionary War. In 1921, Schuyler joined the Socialist Party of America, through which he connected with A. Philip Randolph, who hired him in 1923 as assistant editor for the Messenger; in that -
William Wells Brown
William Wells Brown was a prominent African-American abolitionist lecturer, novelist, playwright, and historian. Born into slavery in the Southern United States, Brown escaped to the North in 1834, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a prolific writer. His novel Clotel (1853) is considered the first novel written by an African American; it was published in London, where he was living at the time. Brown was a pioneer in several different literary genres, including travel writing, fiction, and drama. He has a school named after him in Lexington, Kentucky and was among the first writers inducted to the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
Buy books on Amazon
Lecturing in England when the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law was passed in the US, which required people in -
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.
Buy books on Amazon
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
Wallace Thurman
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Buy books on Amazon
(from Wikipedia) -
Lucy Moore
Librarian Note: There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads database.
Buy books on Amazon
Lucy Moore was born in 1970 and educated in Britain and the United States before reading history at Edinburgh University. She is the editor of Con Men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld, and author of the critically acclaimed The Thieves Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker, and Jack Sheppard, House-Breaker (Viking 1996) as well as Amphibious Thing: the Life of a Georgian Rake (Viking 2000) and Maharanis: The Lives and Times of Three Generations of Indian Princesses (Viking 2004). Maharanis has been reprinted six times, was an Evening Standard bestseller, and the top selling non-fiction title in WH Smith on -
Claude McKay
Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).
Buy books on Amazon
Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green H -
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
Buy books on Amazon -
Andrew Maraniss
Andrew Maraniss is the New York Times bestselling author of STRONG INSIDE, a biography of Perry Wallace, the first African American basketball player in the SEC. The original, adult edition of the book received the Lillian Smith Book Award and the RFK Book Awards' Special Recognition Prize, while the Middle Grade adaptation was named one of the Top Biographies and Top Sports Books for Youth by the American Library Association. Andrew's next book (Nov. 2019) GAMES OF DECEPTION, is the true story of the first U.S. Olympic basketball team, at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. Andrew is a contributor to ESPN's race and sports website, TheUndefeated.com, and is a Visiting Author at Vanderbilt University Athletics. He lives in Brentwood, Tenn.,
Buy books on Amazon -
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 -
Mandy Mikulencak
Mandy Mikulencak has been a writer her entire working life. First, as a journalist, then as an editor and PR specialist for two national nonprofits and a United Nations agency. Today she lives in the mountains of Southwest Colorado with her husband. Her historical novel, THE LAST SUPPERS, was released by Kensington Publishing in late 2017. Her next book, FORGIVENESS ROAD, comes out in March 2019.
Buy books on Amazon -
Keith Haring
Keith Haring (1958–1990) grew up in Pennsylvania and moved to New York in 1978 to enroll in the School of Visual Arts. Over the following decade, he made some of the most widely recognized artwork of the twentieth century.
Buy books on Amazon -
Avrom Reisen
Avrom Reisen (1876–1953), writer, poet, and editor. Born in Koidanov, eastern Belorussia, Avrom Reyzen received a general and Jewish education. His father, Kalmen Reyzen, was a maskil and a writer, as were Avrom’s brother Zalmen and sister Sore.
Buy books on Amazon
Reyzen became a private tutor in his hometown and in surrounding communities, where he grew acquainted with the ideas of the Russian workers’ movement. His collection of poetry, Troyerike motivn gevidmet oreme layt (Sad Motifs Dedicated to the Poor), dealt with social themes and was published at the recommendation of Sholem Aleichem in Philadelphia’s Shtot tsaytung.
As a writer identifying with socialist ideology, Reyzen contributed to the Bund’s legal and illegal publications, often using the pseud -
Frederick Joseph
Frederick Joseph is a Yonkers, NY raised three-time New York Times and USA Today bestselling author. His books include a poetry collection, We Alive, Beloved, two books of nonfiction, Patriarchy Blues, and The Black Friend, a collaboration, Better Than We Found It, a children’s book, The Courage to Dream, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and his recent bestselling, Kirkus and Publisher’s Weekly Starred reviewed YA novel, This Thing of Ours.
Buy books on Amazon -
Robert Frost
Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a
Buy books on Amazon -
E.E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
Buy books on Amazon
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel -
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.
Buy books on Amazon -
Thomas Browne
Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682) was an English polymath and author of works on various subjects, including science, medicine, religion and esoteric.
Buy books on Amazon
Browne's writings display a deep curiosity towards the natural world, influenced by the scientific revolution of Baconian enquiry. Browne's literary works are permeated by references to Classical and Biblical sources as well as the idiosyncrasies of his own personality. Although often described as suffering from melancholia, his writings are also characterised by wit and subtle humour, while his literary style is varied, according to genre, resulting in a rich, unique prose which ranges from rough notebook observations to polished Baroque eloquence.
After graduating M.A. from Broadgates Hall, Oxfor -
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
Buy books on Amazon -
Lewis Carroll
The Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer.
Buy books on Amazon
His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all considered to be within the genre of literary nonsense.
Oxford scholar, Church of England Deacon, University Lecturer in Mathematics and Logic, academic author of learned theses, gifted pioneer of portrait photography, colourful writer of imaginative genius and yet a shy and pedantic man, Lewis Carroll stands pre-eminent in the pantheon of inventive literary geniuses.
He also has works published under his re -
Kristin Lambert
Kristin Lambert lives in a house littered with the remains of the many craft hobbies she learned just to procrastinate writing. Her husband, two daughters, two cats and a dog live there, too, somewhere. She has a BA in journalism and creative writing, and her most prized possessions are her childhood teddy bear Bubbles and a pair of red cowboy boots. The Boy in the Red Dress is her debut novel.
Buy books on Amazon -
Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Annie Allen and one of the most celebrated Black poets. She also served as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position. She was the poet laureate for the state of Illinois for over thirty years, a National Women’s Hall of Fame inductee, and the recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the National Endowment for the Arts. Her works include We Are Shining, Bronzeville Boys and Girls, A Street in Bronzeville, In the Mecca, The Bean Eaters, and Maud Martha.
Buy books on Amazon -
Jonathan Larson
Jonathan Larson was an American Tony Award-winning composer and playwright who lived in New York City and authored musicals, including Rent and Tick, Tick... BOOM!. These musicals tackle serious issues such as multiculturalism, addiction, homophobia, and the AIDS epidemic. His artistic vision and goal was to fuse Generation X and the MTV Generation with the world of musical theatre in his work. This mission was accomplished by his magnum opus, Rent, for which he was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and won four Tony Awards.
Buy books on Amazon -
Liam O'Flaherty
People know Irish writer Liam O'Flaherty especially for his short stories, collected in Two Lovely Beasts (1948) and The Pedlar's Revenge (1976).
Buy books on Amazon
This significant novelist, a major figure in the literary renaissance, also wrote short stories. Left-wing politics involved him as was his brother Tom Maidhc O'Flaherty (also a writer), and their father, Maidhc Ó Flaithearta, for a time. -
Edgar Allan Poe
The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.
Buy books on Amazon
Just as the bizarre c -
David Walker
Librarian note:
Buy books on Amazon
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against the oppressive and unjust slavery. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists. -
Jessie Redmon Fauset
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an American editor, poet, essayist and novelist.
Buy books on Amazon
Fauset was born in Fredericksville, an all-black hamlet in Camden County, New Jersey, also known as Free Haven (now incorporated into the borough of Lawnside, New Jersey). She was the daughter of Anna "Annie" Seamon and Redmon Fauset, a Presbyterian minister. Her mother died when she was still a young girl. Her father remarried Bella Huff (a white woman), and they had three children, including civil rights activist and folklorist Arthur Fauset (1899–1983).
Fauset attended Philadelphia High School for girls, and graduated as the only African American in her class. After high school Fauset graduated from Cornell University in 1905, and is believed to be the second black w -
Wallace Thurman
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Buy books on Amazon
(from Wikipedia) -
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 -
Ann Petry
Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American author who became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street.
Buy books on Amazon
The wish to become a professional writer was raised in Ann for the first time in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class commenting on it with the words: “I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.” The decision to become a pharmacist was her family’s. She turned up in college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years. She also began to write short stories while she was working at the pharmacy.
On February 22, 1938, she marr -
Dylan Thomas
Dylan Marlais Thomas (1914-1953) was a Welsh poet who wrote in English. Many regard him as one of the 20th century's most influential poets.
Buy books on Amazon
In addition to poetry, Thomas wrote short stories and scripts for film and radio, with the latter frequently performed by Thomas himself. His public readings, particularly in America, won him great acclaim; his booming, at times, ostentatious voice, with a subtle Welsh lilt, became almost as famous as his works. His best-known work includes the "play for voices" Under Milk Wood and the celebrated villanelle for his dying father, "Do not go gentle into that good night." Appreciative critics have also noted the superb craftsmanship and compression of poems such as "In my craft or sullen art" and the rhaps -
Claude McKay
Jamaican-born American writer Claude McKay figured prominently in the Harlem renaissance of the 1920s; his works include collections of poetry, such as Constab Ballads (1912), and novels, including Home to Harlem (1928).
Buy books on Amazon
Home to Harlem, a best-seller, won Festus Claudius McKay, a poet and a seminal figure, the Harmon gold award for literature.
He also wrote novels Banjo and Banana Bottom . People not yet published his manuscript, called Amiable with Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem , of 1941.
McKay also authored collections of poetry, a collection of short stories, Gingertown . He authored two autobiographical books, A Long Way from Home and My Green H -
W.B. Yeats
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yeats served as an Irish Senator for two terms. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival, and along with Lady Gregory and Edward Martyn founded the Abbey Theatre, serving as its chief during its early years. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for what the Nobel Committee described as "inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation." He was the first Irishman so honored. Yeats is generally considered one of the few writers who completed their greatest works after b
Buy books on Amazon -
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and collections of folklore. He was also one of the first African-American professors at New York University. Later in life he was a professor of creative literature and writing at Fisk University.
Buy books on Amazon -
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but committed suicide in spite of this. The poetry fed her art, but it also imprisoned her in a way.
Buy books on Amazon
Her parents didn’t expect much of her academically, and after completing her schooling at Rogers Hall, she went to a finishing school in Boston. Anne met her husband, Kayo (Alfred Muller Sexton II), in 1948 by correspondence. Her mother advised her to elope after she thought she might be pregnant. Anne and Kayo got married in 1948 in North Carolina. After the honeymoon Kayo started working at his father-in-law’s wool business.
In 1953 Anne gave birth -
Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor was an African-American novelist whose most popular work, The Women of Brewster Place, was made into a 1984 film starring Oprah Winfrey.
Buy books on Amazon
Naylor won the National Book Award for first fiction in 1983 for The Women of Brewster Place. Her subsequent novels included Linden Hills, Mama Day and Bailey's Cafe. In addition to her novels, Naylor wrote essays and screenplays, as well as the stage adaptation of Bailey's Cafe. Naylor also founded One Way Productions, an independent film company, and was involved in a literacy program in the Bronx.
A native New Yorker, Gloria Naylor was a graduate of Brooklyn College and Yale University. She was distinguished with numerous honors, including Scholar-in-Residence, the University of Pennsylvania -
T.S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns Eliot was a poet, dramatist and literary critic. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948 "for his outstanding, pioneer contribution to present-day poetry." He wrote the poems The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, Ash Wednesday, and Four Quartets; the plays Murder in the Cathedral and The Cocktail Party; and the essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. Eliot was born an American, moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at the age of 25), and became a British subject in 1927 at the age of 39.
Buy books on Amazon
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T.S._Eliot -
William Blake
William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake's work is today considered seminal and significant in the history of both poetry and the visual arts.
Buy books on Amazon
Blake's prophetic poetry has been said to form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body of poetry in the language". His visual artistry has led one modern critic to proclaim him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever produced." Although he only once travelled any further than a day's walk outside London over the course of his life, his creative vision engendered a diverse and symbolically rich corpus, which embraced 'imagination' as "the body of God", or "Human existence itself".
Once considered mad for his i -
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
Buy books on Amazon -
E.E. Cummings
Edward Estlin Cummings was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 14, 1894. He began writing poems as early as 1904 and studied Latin and Greek at the Cambridge Latin High School.
Buy books on Amazon
He received his BA in 1915 and his MA in 1916, both from Harvard University. His studies there introduced him to the poetry of avant-garde writers, such as Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound.
In 1917, Cummings published an early selection of poems in the anthology Eight Harvard Poets. The same year, Cummings left the United States for France as a volunteer ambulance driver in World War I. Five months after his assignment, however, he and a friend were interned in a prison camp by the French authorities on suspicion of espionage (an experience recounted in his novel -
Robert Frost
Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his family and moved to England, where he devoted himself to his poetry. His first two books of verse, A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914), were immediate successes. In 1915 he returned to the United States and continued to write while living in New Hampshire and then Vermont. His pastoral images of apple trees and stone fences -- along with his solitary, man-of-few-words poetic voice -- helped define the modern image of rural New England. Frost's poems include "Mending Wall" ("Good fences make good neighbors"), "Stopping by Woods on a
Buy books on Amazon -
Pablo Neruda
Pablo Neruda, born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in 1904 in Parral, Chile, was a poet, diplomat, and politician, widely considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century. From an early age, he showed a deep passion for poetry, publishing his first works as a teenager. He adopted the pen name Pablo Neruda to avoid disapproval from his father, who discouraged his literary ambitions. His breakthrough came with Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, 1924), a collection of deeply emotional and sensual poetry that gained international recognition and remains one of his most celebrated works.
Buy books on Amazon
Neruda’s career took him beyond literature into diplomacy, a path that a -
Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movies, and television shows spanning over 50 years. She received dozens of awards and more than 50 honorary degrees. Angelou's series of seven autobiographies focus on her childhood and early adult experiences. The first, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), tells of her life up to the age of 17 and brought her international recognition and acclaim.
Buy books on Amazon
She became a poet and writer after a string of odd jobs during her young adulthood. These included fry cook, sex worker, nightclub performer, Porgy and Bess cast member, Southern Christian Leadership -
Mary-Frances Winters
Mary-Frances Winters is the founder and president of The Winters Group, Inc., a 36-year old global diversity, equity and inclusion consulting firm. She is a passionate advocate for justice and equity; a provocateur not afraid to have the difficult conversations. Mary-Frances has over three decades of experience working with corporate leaders in support of enhancing their understanding of what it is like to be the “other.”
Buy books on Amazon
Ms. Winters is a master strategist with experience in strategic planning, change management, diversity, organization development, training and facilitation, systems thinking and qualitative and quantitative research methods. She has extensive experience in working with senior leadership teams to drive organizational change -
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.
Buy books on Amazon -
Nikki Giovanni
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the world's most well-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Buy books on Amazon
Giovanni gained initial fame in the late 1960s as one of the foremost authors of the Black Arts Mov -
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.
Buy books on Amazon -
Ezra Greenspan
Ezra Greenspan holds the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Chair in Humanities and is professor of English at Southern Methodist University. He is the editor of William Wells Brown: A Reader and the author of William Wells Brown: An African American Life. He is a founding editor of the journal Book History.
Buy books on Amazon -
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.
Buy books on Amazon
Married to W.E.B. Du Bois -
Kevin Young
Kevin Young is an American poet heavily influenced by the poet Langston Hughes and the art of Jean-Michel Basquiat. Young graduated from Harvard College in 1992, was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (1992-1994), and received his MFA from Brown University. While in Boston and Providence, he was part of the African-American poetry group, The Dark Room Collective.
Buy books on Amazon
Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Young is the author of Most Way Home, To Repel Ghosts, Jelly Roll, Black Maria, For The Confederate Dead, Dear Darkness, and editor of Giant Steps: The New Generation of African American Writers; Blues Poems; Jazz Poems and John Berryman's Selected Poems.
His Black Cat Blues, originally published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, was included in The Be -
Danez Smith
Danez Smith is the author of [insert] boy (2014, YesYes Books), a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Their 2nd collection will be published by Graywolf Press in 2017. Their work has published & featured widely including in Poetry Magazine, Beloit Poetry Journal, Buzzfeed, Blavity, & Ploughshares. They are a 2014 Ruth Lilly - Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellow, a Cave Canem and VONA alum, and a recipient of a McKnight Foundation Fellowship. They are a 2-time Individual World Poetry Slam finalist, placing 2nd in 2014. They edit for The Offing & are a founding member of 2 collectives, Dark Noise and Sad Boy Supper Club. They live in the midwest most of the time.
Buy books on Amazon
Danez -
Meredith Hall
Meredith Hall’s awards include a two-year literary grant from A Room of Her Own Foundation, a Pushcart Prize and Maine’s Book of the Year award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Kenyon Review, Good Housekeeping, Five Points and many other journals and anthologies. Her debut novel, Beneficence, was published by David. R. Godine Publishing in 2020. Hall is Professor Emerita in the MFA writing program at the University of New Hampshire, and divides her time between Maine and California.
Buy books on Amazon -
Graham Russell Gao Hodges
Graham Russell Gao Hodges is the George Dorland Langdon Jr. Professor of History and Africana & Latin American Studies at Colgate University.
Buy books on Amazon -
Camonghne Felix
Camonghne Felix is a poet, political strategist, media junkie, and cultural worker. She received an MA in arts politics from NYU, an MFA from Bard College, and has received fellowships from Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Poets House. A Pushcart Prize nominee, she is the author of the chapbook Yolk and was listed by Black Youth Project as a “Black Girl from the Future You Should Know.”
Buy books on Amazon -
Melton A. McLaurin
Melton Alonza McLaurin received his Ph.D. in American history from the University of South Carolina in 1967 and taught at the University of South Alabama prior to joining the UNCW department of history as chairperson in 1977. From 1996 until 2003 he served as Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, retiring in 2004. He is the author or co-author of nine books and numerous articles on various aspects of the history of the American South and race relations.
Buy books on Amazon -
Margaret Walker
Dr. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was an African-American poet and author. She wrote as Margaret Walker. One of her most known poems is "For My People".
Buy books on Amazon
Her father Sigismund C. Walker was a Methodist minister and her mother was Marion Dozier Walker. They helped get her started in literature by teaching a lot of philosophy and poetry to her as a child.
In 1935, Walker received her Bachelors of Arts Degree from Northwestern University and in 1936 she began work with the Federal Writers' Project under the Works Progress Administration. In 1942 she received her master's degree in creative writing from the University of Iowa. In 1965 she returned to that school to earn her Ph.D. She also for a time served as a professor at what is today Jackso -
William E. Leuchtenburg
William Edward Leuchtenburg was an American historian who was the William Rand Kenan Jr. Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading scholar of the life and career of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Buy books on Amazon -
Alain LeRoy Locke
American educator and writer Alain LeRoy Locke, whose include Four Negro Poets (1927) and Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), championed the Harlem renaissance.
Buy books on Amazon
People best remember this philosopher as the chief interpreter. Harvard University in 1907 graduated Locke, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first black Rhodes scholar. He studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin and then received a Philosophiae Doctor in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Aesthetics strongly concerned this humanist. His philosophy, cultural pluralism, emphasized the determining of values, most especially the respect for the uniqueness of each personality, to guide human conduct and interrelationships.
Locke taught at Howard University in District of Columbia for -
David Walker
Librarian note:
Buy books on Amazon
There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name
David Walker was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against the oppressive and unjust slavery. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future black leaders and activists. -
Joyce Carol Thomas
Joyce Carol Thomas was an internationally renowned author who received the National Book Award for her first novel, Marked By Fire, and a Coretta Scott King Honor for her first picture book, Brown Honey In Broomwheat Tea. Her other titles include I Have Heard Of A Land, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book; The Gospel Cinderella; cCrowning Glory; Gingerbread Days; and A Gathering Of Flowers. Ms. Thomas lived in Berkeley, California.
Buy books on Amazon -
Stephen L. Harris
Librarian Note:
Buy books on Amazon
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
-
Saul Williams
Saul Williams is an acclaimed American poet, musician, actor, and filmmaker whose work fuses raw political insight, lyrical intensity, and a bold disregard for genre boundaries. Widely recognized for his dynamic presence in both spoken word and alternative hip hop, Williams emerged in the mid-1990s as a vital voice in contemporary poetry before expanding into music, theater, film, and literature.
Buy books on Amazon
Born in Newburgh, New York, Williams studied acting and philosophy at Morehouse College and later earned an MFA from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. It was in New York's vibrant poetry scene that he honed his distinctive voice—fusing personal narrative, political urgency, and rhythmic precision. His breakout came in 1996 when he was named Grand Slam -
Ai
Ai Ogawa (born Florence Anthony) was an American poet who who described herself as 1/2 Japanese, 1/8 Choctaw-Chickasaw, 1/4 Black, 1/16 Irish and as well as Southern Cheyenne and Comanche. She is known for her mastery of the dramatic monologue as a poetic form, as well as for taking on dark, controversial topics in her work. While her poems often contain sex, violence, and other subjects for which she received criticism, she stated during a 1978 interview that she did not view her use of them as gratuitous. About the poems in her first collection, Cruelty, she said: "I wanted people to see how they treated each other and themselves." In 1999 she won the National Book Award for Poetry for Vice: New and Selected Poems.
Buy books on Amazon -
Lawrence W. Levine
Lawrence William Levine was a celebrated American historian. He was born in Manhattan and died in Berkeley, California.
Buy books on Amazon
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.
Buy books on Amazon -
Grif Stockley
Stockley is the author of several books, including Race Relations in the Natural State; Daisy Bates: Civil Rights Crusader from Arkansas, winner of the Ragsdale Award from the Arkansas Historical Association and the Arkansiana Award from the Arkansas Library Association and Blood in Their Eyes: The Elaine Race Massacres of 1919, winner of the Booker Worthen Prize from the Central Arkansas Library System and recipient of a Certificate of Commendation from the American Association for State and Local History. An attorney who has worked with the Center for Arkansas Legal Services, the Disability Rights Center, and the Arkansas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, Stockley completed Ruled by Race while serving as a historian and curric
Buy books on Amazon -
Peter Benjaminson
Born in Washington, D.C., Peter was a reporter and City-County Bureau Chief for the Detroit Free Press from 1970-76.
Buy books on Amazon
While at the Free Press, he wrote the book "Investigative Reporting," with Dave Anderson (Indiana University Press, 1976 and Iowa State University Press, 1990), the first how-to book in that field. It was in print for 20 years.
In 1979 he wrote "The Story of Motown," and from 1979 to 1981 he was a reporter for the Atlanta Journal and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He taught journalism at Binghamton University, New York University, and Columbia University from 1981-91.
In 1984, he wrote "Death in the Afternoon: America's Newspaper Giants Struggle for Survival" (Andrews, McMeel), the first and only book about the death of after -
José García Villa
Jose Garcia Villa was a Filipino poet, literary critic, short story writer, and painter. He was awarded the National Artist of the Philippines title for literature in 1973, as well as the Guggenheim Fellowship in creative writing by Conrad Aiken. He is known to have introduced the "reversed consonance rime scheme" in writing poetry, as well as the extensive use of punctuation marks—especially commas, which made him known as the Comma Poet. He used the penname Doveglion (derived from "Dove, Eagle, Lion"), based on the characters he derived from himself. These animals were also explored by another poet e.e. cummings in Doveglion, Adventures in Value, a poem dedicated to Villa.
Buy books on Amazon
(From wikipedia.org, retrieved 14 March 2011. More info here.) -
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.
Buy books on Amazon
Heron has been more adventurous in his work as a musician and rapper. -
H.T. Tsiang
Poet, playwright, and novelist. Hsi Tseng Tsiang (H. T. Tsiang) was born in China in 1899 and came to America as a child. He was involved with the Greenwich Village literary scene in the 1920s and 1930s, and self-published a number of books which he would hawk at downtown political meetings. Tsiang also appeared as an actor in Hollywood, most notably in the film Tokyo Rose. He died in 1971 in Los Angeles, CA.
Buy books on Amazon -
Brad Leithauser
BRAD LEITHAUSER is a widely acclaimed poet and novelist and the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a MacArthur Fellowship. This is his seventeenth book. He is a professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and divides his time between Baltimore and Amherst.
Buy books on Amazon -
Claudia Emerson
Born and raised in Chatham, Virginia, Claudia Emerson studied writing at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. Her poetry, steeped in the Southern Narrative tradition, bears the influences of Ellen Bryant Voigt, Betty Adcock, and William Faulkner. Of the collection Late Wife (2005), poet Deborah Pope observed, “Like the estranged lover in one of her poems who pitches horseshoes in the dark with preternatural precision, so Emerson sends her words into a different kind of darkness with steely exactness, their arc of perception over and over striking true.”
Buy books on Amazon
Emerson’s volumes of poetry include Pharaoh, Pharaoh (1997); Pinion: An Elegy (2002); Late Wife (2005), which won the Pulitzer Prize; Figure Studies (2008); and Secure the Shadow (20 -
Henry Dumas
In April of 1968, at the age of thirty-three, Henry Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit Authority Policeman at 125th Street Station in a case of "mistaken identity." At the time of his death, he had already finished several manuscripts of poetry and short stories.
Buy books on Amazon
Dumas' poetry, short fiction, and novels have been published posthumously in large part due to the efforts of Eugene Redmond, Toni Morrison, and Quincy Troupe. Poetry for My People first appeared in 1970 and was later published as Play Ebony, Play Ivory. When Play Ebony, Play Ivory appeared in 1974, Julius Lester in the New York Times Book Review called Dumas "the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties." Dumas' first collection of short fiction, Arks of Bones -
George Lillo
George Lillo (3 February 1691 – 4 September 1739)[1] was an English playwright and tragedian. He was a jeweller in London as well as a dramatist. He produced his first stage work, Silvia, or The Country Burial, in 1730. A year later, he produced his most famous play, The London Merchant. He wrote at least six more plays before his death in 1739, including The Christian Hero (1735), Fatal Curiosity (1737) and Marina (1738).[2]
Buy books on Amazon
Contents
Life
George Lillo was born in Moorfields, or Moorgate, in the City of London.[3] He became a partner in his father’s goldsmith-jewellery business.[2]
Early stage works
Lillo wrote at least eight plays between 1730 and his death in 1739. His first work in the theatre was the ballad opera Silvia, or The Country Buria -
Marian L. Thomas
Marian L. Thomas is an award-winning author known for crafting emotionally rich, character-driven women’s fiction. Her novels explore themes of love, resilience, motherhood, and second chances, earning praise from readers and critics alike.
Buy books on Amazon
Marian’s work has been featured in USA Today, Black Enterprise, Southern Writers Magazine, and on media outlets including Fox, NBC, and CBS. She is the author of several novels, including Saving Raine, Someone Like Me, and The Caged Butterfly—recipients of the USA Best Book Award for African-American Fiction.
With a passion for storytelling that touches the heart,
Marian writes to inspire women to embrace their own strength, healing, and joy. She lives in a suburb of Atlanta with her husband of over 20 y