Heavenly birthday wishes Eldridge Cleaver! Born August 31, 1935, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver was an African American writer and political activist. He was an early leader of the Black Panther Party, serving as Minister of Information and, while in exile, head of the International Section of the Panthers. He was known for his book, Soul on Ice. Later in life, he became a conservative Republican. He died in 1998. His other 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:
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 Jabari Asim! Born August 11, Jabari Asim is an African American author, poet, playwright, and professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He has authored six adult books and nine children books.
Belated happy birthday Ross Gay! Born August 1, Ross Gay is an African American poet, essayist, and professor of English at Indiana University who won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award for his 2014 book Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, which was also a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Ross Gay is interested in joy. He wants to understand joy. He is curious about joy. He studies joy. Here are some of his notable works:
Read some of Ross Gay’s poems here:
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:
Heavenly birthday wishes Margaret Walker! Born July 7, 1915, Margaret Walker was an African American poet and author She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago, known as the Chicago Black Renaissance. She is known for her book, Jubilee and her poem, For My People. She died in 1998. Here are a few of her notable works:
You can read some of her poems here:
Belated birthday wishes Jay Wright! Born May 25, Jay Wright is an award winning poet, playwright and essayist. Some of his notable works are:
Celebrating his 83rd birthday March 22, Houston A. Baker, Jr. is a scholar s an American scholar specializing in African-American literature and Distinguished University Professor of English at Vanderbilt University. Here are a few of his books:
Born March 17, Bayard Rustin was a political activist and principal organizer of the March on Washington. Here are a few books by and about Bayard Rustin.
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