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 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.
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 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 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.
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.
Heavenly belated birthday wishes James H. Cone! Born August 6, 1938, James Hal Cone was an African American Methodist minister and theologian. He is best known for his advocacy of black theology and black liberation theology. His 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power provided a new way to comprehensively define the distinctiveness of theology in the black church. He died in 2018. He authored these works:
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 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:
Belated happy birthday Farai Chideya! Born July 27, Farai Chideya is an African American novelist, multimedia journalist, and radio host. Farai states: “I listen critically to stories about our human journey, and track the data on people, governments, and our global society.” Here are a few of her works:
The CamaraIfe Maktaba 