Happy birthday Bernice L. McFadden! Born September 26, Bernice L. McFadden is is a national bestselling, award-winning African American author celebrated for her richly layered novels that center ancestry, memory, and the enduring strength of Black women. She is the author of Sugar, The Book of Harlan, and other acclaimed works of fiction. Her writing has earned numerous honors, including the American Book Award and an NAACP Image Award. Other notable works are:
Heavenly birthday wishes Frances Ellen Watkins! Born September 24, 1825, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper was an African American abolitionist, suffragist, poet, temperance activist, teacher, public speaker, and writer. Beginning in 1845, she was one of the first African American women to be published in the United States. She died in 1911. Here are some of her notable works:
Read some of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper poems here and here:
Heavenly birthday wishes Alain LeRoy Locke! Born September 13, 1885, Alain LeRoy Locke was an African American writer, philosopher, and educator. Distinguished in 1907 as the first African-American Rhodes Scholar, Locke became known as the philosophical architect—the acknowledged “Dean”—of the Harlem Renaissance. He died in 1954. He authored the following notable books:
Heavenly birthday wishes Kristin Hunter Lattany! Born September 12, 1931, Kristin Elaine Hunter was an African-American writer from Pennsylvania. She sometimes wrote under the name Kristin Hunter Lattany. She is best known for her first novel, God Bless the Child, published in 1964. She also authored Kinfolks, Guests in the Promised Land, which was nominated for a National Book Award, The Landlord, which became a motion picture, and a bestselling young adult novel, The Soul Brothers & Sister Lou. She received the Moonstone Black Writing Celebration Lifetime Achievement Award in 1996. She died in 2008.
Happy birthday James McBride! Born September 11, James McBride is an award-winning African American author, musician, and screenwriter. His landmark memoir, The Color of Water, published in 1996, has sold millions of copies and spent more than two years on the New York Times bestseller list. Considered an American classic, it is read in schools and universities across the United States. His other notable and award-winning novels are:
Heavenly birthday wishes Richard Wright! Born September 4, 1908, Richard Wright was an African American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries suffering discrimination and violence. He died in 1960. He was well-known for his novels, Black Boy and Native Son. His other works include:
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.
Heavenly happy birthday James Baldwin! Born August 2, 1924, James Arthur Baldwin was an African American writer and civil rights activist who garnered acclaim for his essays, novels, plays, and poems. His 1953 novel Go Tell It on the Mountain has been ranked by Time magazine as one of the top 100 English-language novels. He died in 1987. His authored other notable works:
Read some of his poetry here:
