Angela Edgar, aka Angee–an Inspiring New Poet, has had a love of writing since her days as a young teenager. With a diverse working history spanning Retail, Video Production, finally forging a Contact Centre career in Market Research, a writing hiatus of 6 years ensued which ended in 2006. Taking up writing all over again, [...]
ABOUT Countee Cullen Cullen won more major literary prizes than any other black writer of the 1920s: first prize in the Witter Bynner Poetry contest in 1925, Poetry magazine’s John Reed Memorial Prize, the Amy Spingarn Award of the Crisis magazine, second prize in Opportunity magazine’s first poetry contest, and second prize in the poetry [...]
Phillis Wheatley was the first black poet in America to publish a book. She was born around 1753 in West Africa and brought to New England in 1761, where John Wheatley of Boston purchased her as a gift for his wife. Although they brought her into the household as a slave, the Wheatleys took a [...]
Derek Alton Wolcott (West Indian poet and playwright) is the third black to receive the ($1.2 million) Nobel Prize for Literature (1992). He was born Jan. 23, 1930, Castries, Saint Lucia , one of the Windward Islands in the Lesser Antilles. The experience of growing up on the isolated volcanic island, an ex-British colony, has [...]
Jean Toomer was born in 1894 in Washington, D.C, the son of a Georgian farmer. Though he passed for white during certain periods of his life, he was raised in a predominantly black community and attended black high schools.CLICK HERE to read entire biography. Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones Are sharpening [...]
Who is this FABULOUS LADY? She wrote Annie Allen in 1949! She is best known for her sensitive portraits of urban blacks who encounter racism and poverty in their daily lives. One of the major modern poets and the first African American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, CLICK HERE to read more about Gwendolyn [...]
His style encompasses two distinct voices — the standard English of the classical poet and the evocative dialect of the turn-of-the-century black community in America. He was gifted in poetry — the way that Mark Twain was in prose — in using dialect to convey character. Paul Laurence Dunbar was one of the first African-American [...]
Rita Dove was born in Akron, Ohio, in 1952. She served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1993 to 1995. Among her many honors are the 1987 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, the 1996 Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities and the 2006 Common Wealth Award. President Bill Clinton bestowed upon her the [...]
I’ve known rivers: I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the flow of human blood in human veins. My soul has grown deep like the rivers. I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young. I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep. I looked upon the [...]
Lucille Clifton first African-American woman to win U.S. poetry prize Last Updated: Thursday, May 10, 2007 | 1:50 PM ET CBC Arts Lucille Clifton, a St. Mary’s, Md.,-based poet and children’s author, has won the $100,000 US Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, one of the largest and most prestigious U.S. literary honours. She becomes the first [...]
