Arnold Rampersad | |
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Born | |
Alma mater | Bowling Green State University (BA, MA) Harvard University (PhD) |
Occupations | Biographer, literary critic, academic |
Notable work | The Life of Langston Hughes (1986); Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007) |
Awards | Anisfield-Wolf Lifetime Achievement Award |
Arnold Rampersad (born 13 November 1941) is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. [1] The second volume (1989) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Biography and Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award for Nonfiction. [2]
Rampersad is currently Professor of English and the Sara Hart Kimball Professor in the Humanities at Stanford University. He was Senior Associate Dean for the Humanities from January 2004 to August 2006.
Rampersad was born in Trinidad and Tobago. His estranged father was journalist Jerome Ewart Rampersad (born Geronimo Ewart Hernandez), who was assumed to have written the famed In the Courts Today column under the pseudonym "McGee" and was a contemporary and colleague of Seepersad Naipaul, father of Nobel Prize winner V. S. Naipaul. His father was born to Christopher Rampersad, a Presbyterian Indian, and Romana Hernandez, a Roman Catholic of Venezuelan Mulatto descent. [3]
Rampersad moved to the US in 1965. He graduated from Bowling Green State University with a bachelor's degree and master's degree in English (1967 and 1968). [4] In 1973, he earned a Ph.D from Harvard University, his dissertation being subsequently published as the intellectual biography The Art and Imagination of W. E. B. Du Bois. [5]
He was a member of the Stanford University English Department from 1974 to 1983, before accepting a position at Rutgers University. Since then he taught there and at Columbia and Princeton, before returning to Stanford in 1998.
Rampersad's teaching covers such areas as 19th- and 20th-century American literature; the literature of the American South; American and African American autobiography; race and American literature; and the Harlem Renaissance.
His published books include biographical works on W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Arthur Ashe, Jackie Robinson, Ralph Ellison, as well as edited volumes of writings by Richard Wright.
From 1991 to 1996, Rampersad held a MacArthur "Genius Grant" fellowship. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society. [6]
In 2007, his biography of Ralph Ellison (1914–1994), on which he had worked for eight years, was a nonfiction finalist for the National Book Award for Nonfiction. [7]
In 2010, Rampersad was awarded the National Humanities Medal, [5] and in 2012 was the recipient of the BIO Award from Biographers International Organization. [8] Also in 2012, he won a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards. [9]
Rampersad is the half-brother of Roger Toussaint, the president of Transport Workers Union Local 100. [10]
Ralph Waldo Ellison was an American writer, literary critic, and scholar best known for his novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953.
Kevin Young is an American poet and the director of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of African American History and Culture since 2021. Author of 11 books and editor of eight others, Young previously served as Director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. A winner of a Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a finalist for the National Book Award for his 2003 collection Jelly Roll: A Blues, Young was Atticus Haygood Professor of English and Creative Writing at Emory University and curator of Emory's Raymond Danowski Poetry Library. In March 2017, Young was named poetry editor of The New Yorker.
Stanley Edgar Hyman was an American literary critic who wrote primarily about critical methods: the distinct strategies critics use in approaching literary texts. He was the husband of writer Shirley Jackson.
Diane Helen Middlebrook was an American biographer, poet, and teacher. She taught feminist studies for many years at Stanford University. She wrote critically acclaimed biographies of poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and jazz musician Billy Tipton.
The Langston Hughes Medal has been awarded annually to celebrate writing achievements by the Langston Hughes Festival of the City College of New York since 1978. The medal is awarded to highly distinguished writers from throughout the African diaspora for their impressive works of poetry, fiction, drama, autobiography and critical essays that help to celebrate the memory and tradition of Langston Hughes. Each year, the Langston Hughes Festival’s Advisory Committee and board reviews the work of major black writers from Africa to America whose work is assessed as likely having a lasting impact on world literature."
Deirdre Bair was an American literary scholar and biographer. She won a National Book Award for her biography of Samuel Beckett in 1981.
Looking for Langston is a 1989 British black-and-white film, directed by Isaac Julien and produced by Sankofa Film & Video Productions. It combines authentic archival newsreel footage of Harlem in the 1920s with scripted scenes to produce a non-linear impressionistic storyline celebrating black gay identity and desire during the artistic and cultural period known as the Harlem Renaissance in New York. The film has a runtime of about 42 minutes.
Seepersad Naipaul was a Trinidadian writer. He was the father of writers V. S. Naipaul, Shiva Naipaul and Savi Naipaul Akal, and married into the influential Indo-Trinidadian Capildeo family.
George William Lamming OCC was a Barbadian novelist, essayist, and poet. He first won critical acclaim for In the Castle of My Skin, his 1953 debut novel. He also held academic posts, including as a distinguished visiting professor at Duke University and a visiting professor in the Africana Studies Department of Brown University, and lectured extensively worldwide.
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award is an American literary award dedicated to honoring written works that make important contributions to the understanding of racism and the appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture. Established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf and originally administered by the Saturday Review, the awards have been administered by the Cleveland Foundation since 1963.
James Mercer Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance. He famously wrote about the period that "the Negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue."
Annette Gordon-Reed is an American historian and law professor. She is currently the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University and a professor of history in the university's Faculty of Arts & Sciences. She is formerly the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard University and the Carol K. Pforzheimer Professor at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Gordon-Reed is noted for changing scholarship on Thomas Jefferson regarding his relationship with Sally Hemings and her children.
Montage of a Dream Deferred is a book-length poem suite published by Langston Hughes in 1951. Its jazz poetry style focuses on scenes over the course of a 24-hour period in Harlem and its mostly African-American inhabitants. The original edition was 75 pages long and comprised 91 individually titled poems, which were intended to be read as a single long poem. Hughes' prefatory note for the book explained his intentions in writing the collection:
In terms of current Afro-American popular music and the sources from which it progressed—jazz, ragtime, swing, blues, boogie-woogie, and be-bop—this poem on contemporary Harlem, like be-bop, is marked by conflicting changes, sudden nuances, sharp and impudent interjections, broken rhythms, and passages sometimes in the manner of a jam session, sometimes the popular song, punctuated by the riffs, runs, breaks, and disc-tortions of the music of a community in transition.
Fine Clothes to the Jew is a 1927 poetry collection by Langston Hughes published by Alfred A. Knopf. Because it departed from sentimental depictions of African-American culture, the collection was widely criticized, especially in the Black press, when it was published.
Biographers International Organization (BIO) is an international, non-profit, 501 (c)(3) organization founded to promote the art and craft of biography, and to further the professional interests of its practitioners. The organization was founded in 2010 by a committee of noted biographers, led by James McGrath Morris, who served as BIO's first Executive Director. The president of BIO as of 2019 is Linda Leavell. The executive director as of 2020 is Michael Gately.
Kris Rampersad is a writer, researcher, lecturer, journalist, publisher, activist and advocate from Trinidad and Tobago.
Edith Karolyn Anisfield Wolf was an American poet and philanthropist from Cleveland. She created and endowed an award in 1935 for non-fiction books that advance racial understanding, and in 1941 expanded the award to include fiction and poetry; the awards are now called the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards.
Poetry for Young People: Langston Hughes is a 2006 children's poetry collection by Langston Hughes edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad and illustrated by Benny Andrews, originally published by Sterling Publishing Company.
George Houston Bass was an American playwright, director and writer. He lived and worked in Providence, Rhode Island. He founded the Rites and Reason Theater at Brown University in September 1970. He was also the literary secretary to and the executor of the literary estate of poet Langston Hughes. Bass founded the Langston Hughes Society in 1981 and the society's publication, the Langston Hughes Review, in 1982.
The Sweet Flypaper of Life is a 1955 fiction and photography book by American photographer Roy DeCarava and American writer Langston Hughes. DeCarava's photos and Hughes's story, told through the character Sister Mary Bradley, depict and describe Black family life in Harlem, New York City, in the 1950s.