Happy birthday Kwame Alexander! Born August 21, Kwame Alexander is an award winning African American poet and author. He is a poet and author of several books for all ages. Read one of his books and I’m sure you will enjoy it! Here are just a few of his notable works:
Heavenly birthday wishes Noni Jabavu! Born August 20, 1919, Helen Nontando Jabavu was a South African writer and journalist, one of the first African women to pursue a successful literary career and the first black South African woman to publish books of autobiography. She died in 2008. Some of her notable works:
Happy birthday Mat Johnson! Born August 19, Mat Johnson is an African American fiction writer who works in both prose and the comics format. In 2007, he was named the first USA James Baldwin Fellow by United States Artists. Here are a few of his notable works:
Happy birthday Fred Moten! Born August 18, Fred Moten is an African American Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. He was an 2020 MacArthur Fellow. Some of his notable works:
Heavenly birthday wishes Marcus Garvey! Born August 17, 1887, Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League. He died in 1940. He authored a few works:
Heavenly birthday wishes, Wallace Thurman! Born August 16, 1902, Wallace Thurman was an African-American editor, critic, novelist, and playwright associated with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. He was well known for his novel, The Blacker the Berry. He died in 1934. Some other works he authored:
Happy birthday Kiese Laymon! Born August 15, Kiese Laymon is an African American southern writer from Jackson, Mississippi. Laymon is the Libbie Shearn Moody Professor of English and Creative Writing at Rice University. Laymon is the author of Long Division, which won the 2022 NAACP Image Award for fiction, and the essay collection, How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, named a notable book of 2021 by the New York Times critics. Laymon’s bestselling memoir, Heavy: An American Memoir, won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, the Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, the Barnes and Noble Discovery Award, the Austen Riggs Erikson Prize for Excellence in Mental Health Media, and was named one of the 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years by The New York Times.
Happy birthday Diane McKinney-Whetstone! Born August 14, Diane McKinney-Whetstone is an African American author of eight novels. Her latest novel, Family spirit was published August, 2025. She mines the city of Philadelphia for her material. The blocks and neighborhoods themselves become characters as she tells stories of everyday people existing in families and communities; characters faltering, yielding to their desires, falling, fighting, climbing, reaching for their better selves. Twice awarded the American Library Association Black Caucus Literary Award for Fiction, she is also a recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant.
Happy birthday Ibram X. Kendi! Born August 13, Ibram Xolani Kendi is an African American author, professor, anti-racism activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in the U.S. He is author of books including Stamped from the Beginning, How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Chain of Ideas.
Heavenly birthday wishes Walter Dean Myers! Born August 12, 1937, Walter Dean Myers was an award-winning African American writer best known for young adult literature. He has written about 70 novels, including the award winning novel, Monster. Some of his young adult literature feature African American young adult males. Walter Dean Myers died in 2014.
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