Happy birthday Glenn C. Loury! Born September 3, Glenn Cartman Loury is an American economist, academic, and author. He is the Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences at Brown University, where he has taught since 2005 also as a professor of economics. His notable works:
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.
Heavenly birthday wishes Janet McDonald! Born August 10, 1953, Janet McDonald was an African American author of young adult novels as well as the author of Project Girl, a memoir about her early life in Brooklyn’s Farragut Houses and struggle to achieve an Ivy League education. She died in 2007. I read Project Girl many years ago. It is a very real, very engaging, and very well written story!
Happy birthday 44th President Barack Obama! Born in Hawaii, August 4, 1961, to a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya, and raised with the help of his grandparents. Barack Obama was the 44th president of the United States, elected in November 2008 and held the office for two terms. A prolific reader, he authored the following books:
Here is Barack Obama’s 2026 Summer Reading List:
Heavenly birthday wishes Ashley Bryan! Born July 13, 1923, Ashley Bryan was a phenomenal award-winning poet and artist. He often wrote and portrayed the African American experience. He died in 2022. Here are just a few of his beautiful works:
Heavenly birthday wishes June Jordan! Born July 9, 1936, June Millicent Jordan was an American poet, essayist, teacher, and activist. In her writing she explored issues of gender, race, immigration, and representation. A prolific writer, June Jordan died in 2002. Here are just a few of her works:
Read some of her poems here:
Heavenly birthday wishes Naomi Long Madgett! Born July 5, 1923, Naomi Long Madgett was an African American poet, educator, and publisher/editor. She was Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit since 2001 and recipient of the 2012 Kresge Eminent Artist Award, is the author of eleven books of poetry and two textbooks and editor of two anthologies. Her poems appear in numerous journals and more than 180 anthologies both here and abroad. Several have been set to music and publicly performed. Her career as a published poet spans more than sixty years. In 1980 Lotus Press, Inc. was recognized as a 501(C)(3) organization specializing in the publication of books of poetry of high literary quality. Naomi continued to serve as publisher/ editor until 2015 when Lotus Press merged with Broadside Press, becoming what is now Broadside Lotus Press. She died in 2020. Here are a few of her notable works:
Belated birthday wishes Thomas Sowell! Born June 30, Thomas Sowell is an African American American economist, economic historian, and social theorist. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV and radio—he is a well-known voice in the American conservative movement as a prominent black conservative. Here are just a few of his works:
Belated birthday wishes James Howard Meredith! Born June 25, 1933, James Howard Meredith is an African American civil rights activist, writer, political adviser, and United States Air Force veteran who became, in 1962, the first African-American student admitted to the racially segregated University of Mississippi after the intervention of the federal government. He wrote a memoir about his experience.
Belated birthday wishes W. Ralph Eubanks! Born June 25, Warren Ralph Eubanks Jr. is an African American author, essayist, journalist, professor, and public speaker. His work focuses on race, identity, and the culture and literature of the American South. From 1995 until May 2013 he was the Director of Publishing of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Here are just a few of his notable works, including his memoir.
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