Jayne Cortez: Firespitter of the Black Arts Movement
Jayne Cortez (born Sallie Jayne Richardson) was a visionary African American poet, performer, and cultural activist whose fierce, music‑driven poetics made her a defining voice...
Category : Literature
Black authors, poets and playwrights. Literary Quotes and Poems.
Rudolph Fisher: A Renaissance Man of Science and Story
Rudolph Fisher (1897–1934) was a physician, radiologist, writer, musician, and orator whose remarkable, though brief, life had a profound impact on the Harlem Renaissance and...
A Free Black Man in Captivity: Reflections of Mumia Abu-Jamal
“I am a thinker, writer, activist, creative being, man, dad, husband, grandpop, and son. But just to keep it simple: I’m a free Black man living in...
The Trees Fall, the Forest Speaks: The Life of Jacques Stephen Alexis
Jacques Stephen Alexis (1922–1961) was a Haitian novelist, neurologist, and Marxist political activist whose life and work came to embody the intertwined struggles for culture,...
Ottobah Cugoano – The Poem
This summer, I embarked on a 21-day trip to Ghana, motivated by my deep admiration for Ottobah Cugoano, an important historical figure whose legacy is...
There It Is by Jayne Cortez
My friendthey don’t careif you’re an individualista leftist a rightista shithead or a snakeThey will try to exploit youabsorb you confine youdisconnect you isolate youor...
Gwendolyn B. Bennett: The Harlem Renaissance Writer and Painter
Gwendolyn B. Bennett was an African-American poet, essayist, short-story writer, and artist. Although she never published her own volume of poetry, she was one of...
In Praise of the Ancestors by Mazisi Kunene
“It is up to the living to keep in touch with the dead. Man’s power don’t end with death. We just move on to another...
Lucille Clifton: The Award-winning Poet
“I write to celebrate life.” “I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being...
Alfred Fagon: Jamaican-born Black-British Playwright
Alfred Fagon was a Jamaican-born playwright, poet and actor. He was one of the most notable Black British playwrights of the 1970s and 1980s. Fagon...