Alice Walker Alice Malsenior Walker is an author, poet, and activist. She has written both fiction and essays about race and gender. She is best known for the critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple (1982) for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She was the fisrt African-Ame... Read more...
Jean Toomer Jean Toomer a poet and novelist and an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His first book Cane is considered by many as his most significant. Toomer's papers and unpublished manuscripts are held by the Beinecke Library at Yale University. Some of Toomer’s works are C... Read more...
Rita Dove Rita Frances Dove is a poet and author. From 1993-1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now popularly known as "United States Poet Laureate". She was the first, and to date only, African-American to be appointed since the po... Read more...
Frederick Douglass Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey was a social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. After escaping from slavery, he became a leader of the abolitionist movement, gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writing. He stood as a living counter-exampl... Read more...
Paul Laurence Dunbar Paul Laurence Dunbar was a poet, novelist, and playwright of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of his popular work in his lifetime used a Negro dialect, which helped him become one of the first nationally-accepted African American writers. Much of his writin... Read more...
Nikki Giovanni Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni is a poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her primary focus is on the individual and the power one has to make a difference in oneself and in the lives of others. Giovanni’s poetry expresses strong racial pride, respect for f... Read more...
John Langston Gwaltney John Langston Gwaltney was a writer and anthropologist focused on African American culture, best known for his book Drylongso: A Self Portrait of Black America. He was a professor of anthropology at the University of Syracuse in New York. Drylongso is a collection of... Read more...
Marcus Garvey Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr. was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA... Read more...
Margaret Walker Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander was a poet and writer. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, she wrote as Margaret Walker. Walker was a literature professor at what is today Jackson State University (1949 to 1979). In 1968, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of History, L... Read more...