Happy birthday Nelson George! Born September 1, Nelson George is an established African American author and filmmaker with a passion for telling stories of the black experience in America. George is the author of several ground breaking histories of African American music, including Where Did Our Love Go: the Rise and Fall of the Motown Sound, The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Hip Hop America and The Hippest Trip in America:Soul Train. He authored a few novels including Urban Romance.
Happy birthday Clint Smith! Born August 25, Clint Smith is an award winning, New York Times bestselling African American author, poet, and scholar. He is the author of the number one New York Times Best Seller, How the Word Is Passed, which won the 2021 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and was named one of the top ten books of 2021 by the New York Times.
Happy birthday Gary Phillips! Born August 24, Gary Phillips is an African American writer, editor, and community activist whose 1994 novel Violent Spring is considered a classic work of crime fiction and one of the essential crime novels about Los Angeles. His notable books are:
Happy birthday Kyra Davis Lurie! Born August 23, Kyra Davis Lurie is a New York Times bestselling African American author and screenwriter. She is the author of The Great Mann, So Much For My Happy Ending, the Sophie Katz mystery series, the Just One Night series and the Pure Sin series. Her books have been published in nine languages across 6 continents. Her first historical fiction novel, The Great Mann, is a literary interpretation of the Great Gatsby.
Happy birthday Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi! Born August 22, Dr. Carolyn Mazloomi is an African American curator, quilter, author, art historian, and aerospace engineer. She is a strong advocate for presenting and documenting African-American-made quilts. Her quilts are designed to tell complex stories around African-American heritage and contemporary experiences. A few of her curated works:
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:
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, 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.
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