Kevin Brown (born September 3, 1960) is an American biographer, essayist, translator, and author. Born in Kansas City, Missouri, Brown developed an interest in writing after completing high school in 1977. While pursuing his studies at Columbia University and City University of New York, he wrote literature reviews and essays for Threepenny Review.
Moving forward, Brown wrote, contributed, or anthologized in Afterimage, American Book Review, Washington Post, and many more. Furthermore, Brown has authored biographies for Romare Bearden (Romare Bearden: Artist) in 1994, and Malcolm X (Malcolm X: His Life and Legacy) in 1995. As well as a contributing editor to the African American Desk Reference in 1999.
Early life
Kevin Brown was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1960, from mother, Duan Nimmons, whose family had been active in the Harlem Renaissance and father John Brown a writer and a football running back. Before primary school, he traveled around Western Europe and North Africa with his father. In the late 60s, Brown lived in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, attending Twin Peaks Elementary School. In the early 1970s, he lived in the Bay Area peninsula, in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, attending Ralston Middle School in Belmont, California, as well as Rancho Junior High and Samuel Ayer High School in Milpitas, California, a suburb of San Jose. He graduated from Southeast High School in Kansas City, Missouri (1977). From 1978 to 1979, he lived in St. Louis, Missouri, reading, writing, and waiting tables.[1]
From 1987 to 1989, Brown was a regular contributor to Kirkus Reviews, where he published book reviews on subjects as various as Africa, African-American writers, 20th century American poetry, Anglo-American common law, Australian-New Zealand writers, French history and literature, the Harlem Renaissance, music, photography, politics.[1]
In 1994, Brown's biography of Romare Bearden, Romare Bearden: Artist, was released.[4]
In 1995, Brown's biography of Malcolm XMalcolm X: His Life and Legacy was released.[5] Commissioned in 1993, just after the release of Spike Lee's movie on the same subject, Brown's second book attempts to chronicle the rise and fall of Malcolm X as well as that of rival leader Martin Luther King against the backdrop of the civil rights and black nationalist movements.[6]
In 1999, Brown was a contributing editor for the book African American Desk Reference about essential information on African American history. Brown provided chapter 14 on music.[7]
Brown's 2005 translation into Spanish of Virginia Woolf's little known essay "Reviewing" appeared in the Iowa University journal of literary translation eXchanges.[citation needed]
Brown lived in New York for 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, during which time he married and had a son. Brown returned to California in 2007, and currently lives in San Diego.[1]
Family history
Brown's career and writing were influenced by his family history. His father, John Brown, was a writer and running back with the late 1950s Iowa Hawkeyes football team who played in the 1959 Rose Bowl. In the mid-1960s, John Brown was acquainted with writers William S. Burroughs, Ted Joans, and other writers of the Beat Generation. Brown's mother, Duan Nimmons, was born (1940) in New York City, where her family had been active in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and early 1930s. His maternal great-grandmother was Ida Mae Roberson (later, Ida Cullen-Cooper), widow of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen.[1]
Charles Henry Alston was an American painter, sculptor, illustrator, muralist and teacher who lived and worked in the New York City neighborhood of Harlem. Alston was active in the Harlem Renaissance; Alston was the first African-American supervisor for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Art Project. Alston designed and painted murals at the Harlem Hospital and the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building. In 1990, Alston's bust of Martin Luther King Jr. became the first image of an African American displayed at the White House.
Romare Bearden was an American artist, author, and songwriter. He worked with many types of media including cartoons, oils, and collages. Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Bearden grew up in New York City and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and graduated from New York University in 1935.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was an editor, poet, essayist, novelist, and educator. Her literary work helped sculpt African-American literature in the 1920s as she focused on portraying a true image of African-American life and history. Her black fictional characters were working professionals which was an inconceivable concept to American society during this time Her story lines related to themes of racial discrimination, "passing", and feminism.
Kevin Powell is an American writer, activist, and television personality. Powell is the author of 14 books, including The Education of Kevin Powell: A Boy's Journey into Manhood and When We Free the World published in 2020. Powell was a senior writer during the founding years of VIBE magazine from 1992 to 1996. Powell's activism has focused on ending poverty, advocating for social justice and counteracting violence against women and girls through local, national and international initiatives. He was a Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Brooklyn, New York, in 2008 and 2010.
African-American art is a broad term describing visual art created by African Americans. The range of art they have created, and are continuing to create, over more than two centuries is as varied as the artists themselves. Some have drawn on cultural traditions in Africa, and other parts of the world, for inspiration. Others have found inspiration in traditional African-American plastic art forms, including basket weaving, pottery, quilting, woodcarving and painting, all of which are sometimes classified as "handicrafts" or "folk art".
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is a research library of the New York Public Library (NYPL) and an archive repository for information on people of African descent worldwide. Located at 515 Malcolm X Boulevard between West 135th and 136th Streets in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City, it has, almost from its inception, been an integral part of the Harlem community. It is named for Afro-Puerto Rican scholar Arturo Alfonso Schomburg.
Ernest Crichlow was an American social realist artist known for his narrative paintings and illustrations from the Depression-era, which focused on social injustice and the realities faced by African Americans.
Mary Schmidt Campbell, is an American academic administrator and museum curator. She was the 10th president of Spelman College serving from 2015 to 2022. Prior to this position, she served as a curator and as the director for art museums, as the director of the Commission for the Department of Cultural Affairs of New York City, and for many years as the Dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University.
"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.
Bessye Johnson Bearden was an American journalist and civic activist, who was the mother of artist Romare Bearden.
Norman Wilfred Lewis was an American painter, scholar, and teacher. Lewis, who was African-American and of Bermudian descent, was associated with abstract expressionism, and used representational strategies to focus on black urban life and his community's struggles.
Herbert Alexander Gentry was an African-American Expressionist painter who lived and worked in Paris, France, Copenhagen, Denmark (1958–63), in the Swedish cities of Gothenburg (1963–65), Stockholm, and Malmö (1980–2001), and in New York City (1970–2000) as a permanent resident of the Hotel Chelsea.
The St. Nicholas Historic District, known colloquially as "Striver's Row", is a historic district located on both sides of West 138th and West 139th Streets between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, in the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is both a national and a New York City historic district, and consists of row houses and associated buildings designed by three architectural firms and built in 1891–93 by developer David H. King Jr. These are collectively recognized as gems of New York City architecture, and "an outstanding example of late 19th-century urban design":
Spiral was a collective of African-American artists initially formed by Romare Bearden, Charles Alston, Norman Lewis, and Hale Woodruff on July 5, 1963. It has since become the name of an exhibition, Spiral: Perspectives on an African-American Art Collective.
Harlem Writers Guild (HWG) is the oldest organization of African-American writers, originally established as the Harlem Writers Club in 1950 by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore and Walter Christmas. The Harlem Writers Guild seeks to give African-American writers a platform to present their art in its entirety without censoring their experience of being Black in the United States of America. In addition to publishing works, the Harlem Writers Guild also acts as an organization to promote social change and an entity that hosts events to celebrate and promote their members.
William Ellisworth Artis was an African-American sculptor, whose favorite medium was clay. The freedom of modeling gave him a broad range of expression. During the latter part of his life, he began to focus on potting.
Theophilus Lewis (1891–1974) was an African-American drama critic, a writer, and a magazine editor during the Harlem Renaissance whose contributions primarily appeared in The Messenger, the socialist African-American magazine founded by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Lewis was well known for his staunch support of the advancement of a black aesthetic in the arts, particularly the advancement of plays that represented African-Americans well.
Arthur Paul Davis was an influential, African-American university professor, literary scholar, and the writer and editor of several important critical texts such as The Negro Caravan, The New Cavalcade, and From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900–1960. Influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, Davis has inspired many African-Americans to pursue literature and the arts.
Frank Stewart is an African-American photographer based in New York. He is best known for photographing prominent Jazz musicians.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
