A. R Flowers
(b. 1951), novelist, essayist, and cultural activist.A native Memphian, Arthur Flowers's writing integrates regional African American culture, including blues music, hoodoo spirituality, Delta ...
Abraham Lincoln
(1809–65)US Republican statesman, 16th President of the USA (1861–65). His election as President on an anti‐slavery platform antipathetic to the interests of the southern states helped precipitate ...
Adrienne Kennedy
(1931–),playwright of African-American heritage whose works exhibit the conflict between her inheritances—black father, light mother—especially in Funnyhouse of a Negro (1962), in which the main ...
African American literature
The body of writing or performed art produced by African slaves and their descendants in America. One of its earliest forms was the slave narrative where the author describes the ...
Alain Locke
(1886–1954).Philosopher, writer, and principal theorist of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Philadelphia, Alain LeRoy Locke graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 1907. That year, he was the first ...
A'Lelia Walker
(b. 6 June 1885; d. 15 August 1931), entrepreneur.A’Lelia Walker, heiress to the hair care empire created by her mother Madam C. J. Walker, is best remembered as the ...
Alfred H. Mendes
(1897– ),Trinidadian novelistand short-story writer, born in Trinidad, educated at Hitchin Grammar School in England. During the 1920s and 1930s he published short stories and essays, in Trinidad and ...
Alice Walker
(1944– )Black US novelist and poet whose writing explores racial and sexual politics as they affect African-American women.Born into a family of sharecroppers in Eatonton, Georgia, Alice Walker ...
Anne Spencer
(1882–1975), poet, librarian, community activist,and muse and confidante to Harlem Renaissance intellectuals and literati. Anne Spencer was born inauspiciously on a Virginia plantation. Yet the ...
Arnold Rampersad
(b. 1941), scholar, literary and cultural critic, educator, winner of the American Book Award, and MacArthur Fellow.Born in 1941 in Trinidad, Arnold Rampersad received a BA and MA from Bowling Green ...
Arthenia J. Bates Millican
(b. 1920), poet, educator, short fiction writer, lecturer, and humanist of the rural southern folk.Born Arthenia Bernetta Jackson on 1 June 1920, in Sumter, South Carolina, this African American ...
Askia M. Touré
(b. 1938), poet, community activist, lecturer, and educator.Askia M. Touré, in his multifaceted roles as poet, community activist, lecturer, and educator, is recognized as one of the original ...
Big Miller
B. Clarence Horatio Miller, 18 December 1922, Sioux City, Iowa, USA, d. 9 June 1992, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Miller’s parents were Henry Miller, a Sioux, who was a preacher, and ...
Big Sea
Langston Hughes's first volume of autobiography (1940) covers the years of his life from his birth in 1902 to the spring of 1931. Fundamentally episodic, The Big Sea is a succession of brief ...
Blacker the Berry
Wallace Thurman's first novel, The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929) takes its title from an old folk saying, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” It is an autobiographical ...
Bontemps, Arna
(1902–73),Louisiana-born author, educated in California, received an M.A. from the University of Chicago, and was librarian of Fisk University. His novels about his black people include God Sends ...
Brownies' Book
From January 1920 through December 1921, W. E. B. Du Bois and Augustus Granville Dill published The Brownies’ Book, a young people's magazine dedicated especially to African American children from ...
Calvin C Hernton
(1934–2001), poet, novelist, essayist, and educator.Born 28 April in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Magnolia Jackson, Calvin Coolidge Hernton came of age as a writer in the late 1960s and early 1970s. ...
Cane
Work by Jean Toomer, published in 1923, is a major product of the Harlem Renaissance. A brief book incorporating stories, poetry, and a play, the first third presents black people, mainly women, in ...
