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".
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
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Susan Rivers
Susan Rivers began her writing career as a playwright, receiving the Julie Harris Playwriting Award and the New York Drama League Award, and working as an NEA Writer-in-Residence in San Francisco.
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Her focus shifted to fiction with a move to the Carolinas in 1995. Rivers' debut novel, The Second Mrs. Hockaday, was published by Algonquin Books in 2017. It was a People Magazine "Best New Books Pick" and a Woman's Day "Editor's Desk Pick" in 2017, as well as IndieNext, Library Reads and Winter OKRA Picks, and was a Women's National Book Association Great Group Reads 2018 Selection. The novel was a finalist for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize 2017 and the Southern Book Prize 2018.
The author lives and writes in upstate South Carolina. -
Yuval Taylor
Yuval Taylor, whose books include Faking It, I Was Born a Slave, The Cartoon Music Book, and The Future of Jazz, lives in Chicago.
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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.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Rosemary Mahoney
Rosemary Mahoney (born January 28, 1961 Boston) is an American non-fiction writer.
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She grew up in Milton, Massachusetts, andgraduated from St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire). She worked briefly for Lillian Hellman.
She has attended Yaddo.
She has written for numerous publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Elle, National Geographic Traveler, O Magazine, and the New York Times Magazine.
The Early Arrival of Dreams: A Year in China was a New York Times Notable Book in 1990, and Whoredom in Kimmage: The World of Irish Women, was a New York Times Notable book and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in 1994, British writer Jan Morris listed her 2007 Down the Nile -
Margaret Verble
Margaret Verble, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, has set her novel on her family’s Indian allotment land near Ft. Gibson, OK. She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
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Verble is a successful business woman and novelist. Her consulting work has taken her to most states and to several foreign countries. Upon the publication of her debut novel, Maud’s Line, Margaret whittled her consulting practice down to one group of clients, organ procurement organizations, tissue banks, and eye banks, to devote the rest of her time to writing. Maud’s Line is a Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. -
Mark Childress
Mark Childress was born in Monroeville, Alabama. He is the author of the novels A WORLD MADE OF FIRE, V FOR VICTOR, TENDER, CRAZY IN ALABAMA, GONE FOR GOOD, ONE MISSISSIPPI, and GEORGIA BOTTOMS. Childress has received the Harper Lee Award for Alabama's Distinguished Author, Thomas Wolfe Award, the University of Alabama's Distinguished Alumni Award, and the Alabama Library Association's Writer of the Year. He is a staff member and a director of the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley. He has lived in Ohio, Indiana, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, California, Costa Rica, and currently lives in Key West, Florida, where he is writing his eighth novel and a film script.
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Edna Ferber
Edna Ferber was an American novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her novels were popular in her lifetime and included the Pulitzer Prize-winning So Big (1924), Show Boat (1926; made into the celebrated 1927 musical), Cimarron (1929; made into the 1931 film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture), and Giant (1952; made into the 1956 Hollywood movie).
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Ferber was born August 15, 1885, in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to a Hungarian-born Jewish storekeeper, Jacob Charles Ferber, and his Milwaukee, Wisconsin-born wife, Julia (Neumann) Ferber. At the age of 12, after living in Chicago, Illinois and Ottumwa, Iowa, Ferber and her family moved to Appleton, Wisconsin, where she graduated from high school and briefly attended Lawrence University. -
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Leonard Pitts Jr. was born and raised in Southern California. He is a columnist for the Miami Herald and won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of more than 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition. His columns on the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman have garnered much attention from his peers and readers alike.
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Pitts's column, "We'll Go Forward From This Moment," an angry and defiant open letter to the terrorists, generated upwards of 30,000 emails and has since been set to music, reprinted in poster form, r -
Laila Lalami
Laila Lalami is the author of five books, including The Moor’s Account, which won the American Book Award, the Arab-American Book Award, and the Hurston Wright Legacy Award. It was on the longlist for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her most recent novel, The Other Americans, was a national bestseller, won the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty languages. She has been awarded fellowships from the British Council, the Fulbright Program, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University. She lives in Los Angeles.
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Edward Kelsey Moore
Edward Kelsey Moore is a professional cellist and author from Chicago. During his high school years, and onward into college, Edward Kelsey Moore experimented with writing short stories. As he finished his education he set writing aside and focused on building a career in music. Many years later, as a member of a string quartet, Edward was hired to perform at a reception for the winners of a local writing contest. As he played background music Edward considered: "I could have sent in a story..." It was an inspiring event and within a few weeks Edward Kelsey Moore began writing again. His short fiction has been published in many literary magazines including: Indiana Review, African American Review, and Inkwell. His short story Grandma and th
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Amanda Stern
Amanda Stern is the author of the memoir Little Panic, the novel The Long Haul, and eleven books for children written under pseudonyms. In 2003, she founded the Happy Ending Music and Reading Series which she ran until 2016, at Joe’s Pub and later at Symphony Space. She currently writes the psychology and mental health newsletter "How to Live" at https://amandastern.bulletin.com
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David Guterson
David Guterson is an American novelist, short story writer, poet, journalist, and essayist. He is best known as the author of the bestselling Japanese American internment novel Snow Falling on Cedars.
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Chinua Achebe
Works, including the novel Things Fall Apart (1958), of Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe describe traditional African life in conflict with colonial rule and westernization.
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This poet and critic served as professor at Brown University. People best know and most widely read his first book in modern African literature.
Christian parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in southeastern Nigeria reared Achebe, who excelled at school and won a scholarship for undergraduate studies. World religions and traditional African cultures fascinated him, who began stories as a university student. After graduation, he worked for the Nigerian broadcasting service and quickly moved to the metropolis of Lagos. He gained worldwide attention in the late 1950s; his la -
James Baldwin
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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Works of American writer James Arthur Baldwin, outspoken critic of racism, include Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), a novel, and Notes of a Native Son (1955), a collection of essays.
James Arthur Baldwin authored plays and poems in society.
He came as the eldest of nine children; his stepfather served as a minister. At 14 years of age in 1938, Baldwin preached at the small fireside Pentecostal church in Harlem. From religion in the early 1940s, he transferred his faith to literature with the still evident impassioned cadences of black churches. From 1948, Baldwin made his home primarily in the south of France -
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.
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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 -
Alex Haley
Alexander Murray Palmer Haley was an American writer. He is best known as the author of Roots: The Saga of an American Family, and of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the latter of which he wrote in collaboration with Malcolm X.
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Nalo Hopkinson
Nalo Hopkinson is a Jamaican-born writer and editor who lives in Canada. Her science fiction and fantasy novels and short stories often draw on Caribbean history and language, and its traditions of oral and written storytelling.
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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.
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Muriel Rukeyser
Muriel Rukeyser was an American poet and political activist, best known for her poems about equality, feminism, social justice, and Judaism. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation".
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One of her most powerful pieces was a group of poems entitled The Book of the Dead (1938), documenting the details of the Hawk's Nest incident, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
Her poem "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century" (1944), on the theme of Judaism as a gift, was adopted by the American Reform and Reconstructionist movements for their prayer books, something Rukeyser said "astonished" her, as she had remained distant from Judaism throughout her early life. -
Langston Hughes
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of White Folks (1934).
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People best know this social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist James Mercer Langston Hughes, one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form jazz poetry, for his famous written work about the period, when "Harlem was in vogue."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langsto... -
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).
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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 -
Meridel Le Sueur
“The people are a story that never ends,
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A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
Meridel LeSueur, North Star Country (1945)
Meridel LeSueur’s poetry, her short stories, and novels are a beloved part of the cultural and political fabric of our times. She was one of the great women litera -
Lillian E. Smith
Lillian Smith was a writer and social critic of the Southern United States, known best for her best-selling novel Strange Fruit (1944). A white woman who openly embraced controversial positions on matters of race and gender equality, she was a southern liberal unafraid to criticize segregation and work toward the dismantling of Jim Crow laws, at a time when such actions almost guaranteed social ostracism.
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Lillian Eugenia Smith was born on December 12, 1897 in the America before women's suffrage to a prominent family in Jasper, Florida, the eighth of ten children. Her life as the daughter of a middle class civic and business leader took an abrupt turn in 1915 when her father lost his turpentine mills. The family was not without resources howe -
Dorothy West
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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Dorothy West was a novelist and short story writer who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family.
West's principal contribution to the Harlem Renaissance was to publish the magazine Challenge, which she founded in 1934 with $40. She also published the magazines successor, New Challenge. These magazines were among the first to publish literature featuring realistic portrayals of African Americans. Among the works published were Richard Wright's groundbreaking essay "Blueprint for Negro Writing," together with writings by Margare -
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.
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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 -
Bernice L. McFadden
BERNICE L. McFADDEN is the author of ten critically acclaimed novels including Praise Song for the Butterflies (Long listed for the 2019 Women's Prize in Fiction ) The Book of Harlan (winner of a 2017 American Book Award and the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work, Fiction) Sugar, Loving Donovan, Nowhere Is a Place, The Warmest December, Gathering of Waters (a New York Times Editors’ Choice and one of the 100 Notable Books of 2012) and Glorious . She is a four-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, as well as the recipient of four awards from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA).
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McFadden has also penned five novels under the pseudonym: Geneva Holliday
She is a visiting assistant professor of creative -
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.
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(from Wikipedia) -
Sherley Anne Williams
Sherley Anne Williams (August 25, 1944 – July 6, 1999) was an African-American poet, novelist, professor, and social critic. Many of her works tell stories about her life in the African-American community.
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Williams was born in Bakersfield, California. When she was little her family picked cotton in order to get money. At the age of eight her father died of tuberculosis and when she was sixteen her mother died. She graduated from Thomas Alva Edison High School in Fresno California in 1962. In 1966 she earned her bachelor's degree in English at what is now California State University at Fresno and she received her master's degree at Brown University in 1972. The following year (1973) she became a professor of English Literature at the Universi -
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Harriet Ann Jacobs, usually wrote under the name Harriet Jacobs but also used the pseudonym Linda Brent.
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Harriet was born in Edenton, North Carolina to Daniel Jacobs and Delilah. Her father was a mulatto carpenter and slave owned by Dr. Andrew Knox. Her mother was a mulatto slave owned by John Horniblow, a tavern owner. Harriet inherited the status of both her parents as a slave by birth. She was raised by Delilah until the latter died around 1819. She then was raised by her mother's mistress, Margaret Horniblow, who taught her how to sew, read, and write.
In 1823, Margaret Horniblow died, and Harriet was willed to Horniblow's niece, Mary Matilda Norcom, whose father, Dr. James Norcom, became her new master. She and her brother John went to -
Leonard Pitts Jr.
Leonard Pitts Jr. was born and raised in Southern California. He is a columnist for the Miami Herald and won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He was also a finalist for the Pulitzer in 1992. In 1997, Pitts took first place for commentary in division four (newspapers with a circulation of more than 300,000) in the American Association of Sunday and Feature Editors' Ninth Annual Writing Awards competition. His columns on the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin by George Zimmerman have garnered much attention from his peers and readers alike.
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Pitts's column, "We'll Go Forward From This Moment," an angry and defiant open letter to the terrorists, generated upwards of 30,000 emails and has since been set to music, reprinted in poster form, r -
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Margaret Verble
Margaret Verble, an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, has set her novel on her family’s Indian allotment land near Ft. Gibson, OK. She currently lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
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Verble is a successful business woman and novelist. Her consulting work has taken her to most states and to several foreign countries. Upon the publication of her debut novel, Maud’s Line, Margaret whittled her consulting practice down to one group of clients, organ procurement organizations, tissue banks, and eye banks, to devote the rest of her time to writing. Maud’s Line is a Finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. -
Megan Hunter
Megan Hunter’s first novel, The End We Start From, was published in 2017 in the UK, US, and Canada, and has been translated into eight languages. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Books Are My Bag Awards, longlisted for the Aspen Words Prize, was a Barnes and Noble Discover Awards finalist and won the Forward Reviews Editor’s Choice Award. Her writing has appeared in The White Review, The TLS, Literary Hub, BOMB Magazine and elsewhere. Her second novel, The Harpy, will be published in 2020.
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Amanda Gorman
Amanda Gorman was the first Youth Poet Laureate of the United States. She is also an activist. Gorman's work focuses on issues of oppression, feminism, race, and marginalization, as well as the African diaspora. In January 2021, she became the youngest poet to read at a presidential inauguration, reading her poem "The Hill We Climb" at the inauguration of Joe Biden.
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Stephen L. Harris
Librarian Note:
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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Sabrina Strings
Sabrina Strings is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Irvine, and a recipient of the Berkeley Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellowship, where she held appointments in the Department of Sociology and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley.
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Malcolm D. Lee
Malcolm D. Lee is an award-winning writer, director, and producer celebrated for a string of box office successes, including The Best Man, Girls Trip, Night School, and Space Jam: A New Legacy. With Girls Trip, Lee made history as the first filmmaker to helm a feature with an all–African American creative team—both in front of and behind the camera—that grossed over $100 million at the domestic box office.
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In 2022, he returned to his beloved franchise with The Best Man: The Final Chapters, the critically acclaimed Peacock limited series that became the first original on the platform to break into Nielsen’s Top 10. Most recently, Lee completed filming his 12th feature film an Untitled collaboration with Blumhouse Productions and Universal Pic -
David Levering Lewis
David Levering Lewis is the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History Emeritus at New York University.
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Maja Haderlap
Austrian author of Carinthian Slovenian descent. In 2011 she won the 25,000 Euro prize prestigious Ingeborg Bachmann prize at the 35th Festival of German Literature in Klagenfurt. Her award-winning poetic text is a three-generations family history, and highlights the resistance of the Carinthian Slovenes against the German Nazi Wehrmacht.
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She studied German language and literature at the University of Vienna and has a PhD in Theatre Studies. As a writer, she was co-editor of many years of bi-lingual Carinthian-Slovene literary magazine 'Mladje'. -
Meridel Le Sueur
“The people are a story that never ends,
Buy books on Amazon
A river that winds and falls and gleams erect in many dawns;
Lost in deep gulleys, it turns to dust, rushes in the spring freshet,
Emerges to the sea. The people are a story that is a long incessant
Coming alive from the earth in better wheat, Percherons,
Babies, and engines, persistent and inevitable.
The people always know that some of the grain will be good,
Some of the crop will be saved, some will return and
Bear the strength of the kernel, that from the bloodiest year
Some survive to outfox the frost.”
Meridel LeSueur, North Star Country (1945)
Meridel LeSueur’s poetry, her short stories, and novels are a beloved part of the cultural and political fabric of our times. She was one of the great women litera -
Michael J. Klarman
An American legal historian, and constitutional law scholar, Michael Klarman is the Kirkland & Ellis Professor at Harvard Law School.
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