Toni Cade Bambara, born Miltona Mirkin Cade, was an African-American author, documentary film-maker, social activist and college professor.
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. They are, perhaps, his most popular works. In 2020, Mosley received the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, making him the first Black man to receive the honor.
Edwidge Danticat is a Haitian American novelist and short story writer. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was published in 1994 and went on to become an Oprah's Book Club selection. Danticat has since written or edited several books and has been the recipient of many awards and honors. As of the fall of 2023, she will be the Wun Tsun Tam Mellon Professor of the Humanities in the department of African American and African Diaspora Studies at Columbia University.
Ntozake Shange was an American playwright and poet. As a Black feminist, she addressed issues relating to race and Black power in much of her work. She is best known for her Obie Award–winning play, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf (1975). She also penned novels including Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo (1982), Liliane (1994), and Betsey Brown (1985), about an African-American girl run away from home.
Brother to Brother is a 2004 film written and directed by Rodney Evans. The film debuted at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, where it was awarded with the Special Jury Prize for Dramatic Feature. It went on to play the gay and lesbian film festival circuit where it collected many top festival awards. Brother to Brother was given a limited theatrical release in November 2004.
The City College of the City University of New York is a public research university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. It is the oldest of CUNY's 25 institutions of higher learning and is considered its flagship institution.
The National Black Writers Conference (NBWC) is presented by the Center for Black Literature (CBL) at Medgar Evers College of The City University of New York. Founded by Dr. Brenda M. Greene, the Center for Black Literature was officially approved by the College Council of Medgar Evers College and by the board of trustees in October 2002. Its mission is to expand, broaden, and enrich the public's knowledge and aesthetic appreciation of literature produced by people of the African diaspora. It accomplishes its mission through a variety of programs and partnerships and by serving as a forum for the discussion, reading, research, study, and critical analysis of Black literature. It is the only center devoted to this mission in the country.
Akasha Gloria Hull is an American poet, educator, writer, and critic whose work in African-American literature and as a Black feminist activist has helped shape Women's Studies. As one of the architects of Black Women's Studies, her scholarship and activism has increased the prestige, legitimacy, respect, and popularity of feminism and African-American studies.
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."
The New York State Writers Hall of Fame or NYS Writers Hall of Fame is a project established in 2010 by the Empire State Center for the Book, which is the New York State affiliate of the U.S. Library of Congress's Center for the Book, and the Empire State Book Festival. Beginning in 2020, the Empire State Center for the Book partners with the New York State Writers Institute in presenting the awards.
Thulani Davis is an American playwright, journalist, librettist, novelist, poet, and screenwriter. She is a graduate of Barnard College and attended graduate school at both the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia University.
Dianne McIntyre is an American dancer, choreographer, and teacher. Her notable works include Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Dance Adventure in Southern Blues , an adaptation of Zora Neal Hurston's novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, as well as productions of why i had to dance,spell #7, and for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf, with text by Ntozake Shange. She has won numerous honors for her work including an Emmy nomination, three Bessie Awards, and a Helen Hayes Award. She is a member of the Stage Directors and Choreographers Society, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and the Dramatists Guild of America.
The Sweet Breath of Life: A Poetic Narrative of the African-American Family is a 2004 photographic poetic narrative by Ntozake Shange and the photography collective Kamoinge Inc. The Kamoinge Workshop was founded in New York in 1963 to support the work of black photographers in a field then dominated by white photographers. The book was first published on October 26, 2004, through Atria Books and was edited by Frank Steward, the president of Kamoinge Inc.
The Dark Room Collective was an influential African-American poetry collective. Established in 1988, the collective hosted a reading series that featured leading figures in Black literature.
Dr. Vanessa K. Valdés is an author, educator, writer, editor, historian. For seventeen years, she was a professor of Spanish and Portuguese at the City University of New York. She is a Puerto Rican of African descent. She is the author of three books, including Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017). Schomburg was one of the founding fathers of Black History in North America, and the father of the Global African Diaspora. She has also written Oshun's Daughters: The Search for Womanhood in the Americas (2014). In Oshun's Daughters she examines African Diasporic sense of womanhood, examining novels, poems, etc., written by Diaspora women from the United States, the Caribbean, and Brazil. Writings that show how these women use traditional Yoruba religion as alternative models for their womanhood differing from western concepts of being a woman. With David Pullins, she is the co-author of Juan de Pareja, Afro-Hispanic Painter in the Age of Velázquez (2023), which accompanied its exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from March 27 - July 16, 2023.
Margaret Rose Vendryes was a visual artist, curator, and art historian based in New York.
Raymond Richard Patterson was an American poet, opera librettist, and educator.
Brenda M. Greene, is an American scholar, author, literary activist, and radio host at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. Greene is also the founder and executive director of the Center for Black Literature, the director of the National Black Writers Conference, and the former chair of the English department at Medgar Evers College. Prior to her work in the academy, Greene also worked as an educator in the New York City Public School system, and with civic and political organizations, to enrich and engage the community-at-large. Since 2004, she has served as a radio host on WNYE radio, connecting listeners to some of today's most accomplished writers. She is the former board chair of the Nkiru Center for Education and Culture, co-founded by hip hop icons Yasiin Bey and Talib Kweli. Greene is a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
The Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation is an American literary nonprofit organization that supports the development and careers of Black writers. The Foundation provides classes, workshops, an annual conference, and offers the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the North Star Award, among others. Writer Marita Golden and cultural historian Clyde McElvene founded the organization in 1990.
Mecca Jamilah Sullivan is an American writer and professor, best known for her debut novel Big Girl (2022). Her short story collection Blue Talk & Love received the 2018 Judith A. Markowitz Award for emerging LGBTQ writers from Lambda Literary. Sullivan is currently an associate professor of English at Georgetown University, where she teaches courses in African-American poetry, Black queer and feminist literature, and creative writing.
