Countee Cullen was an American poet, novelist, children's writer, and playwright, particularly well known during the Harlem Renaissance.
Sir Isaac Julien is a British installation artist, filmmaker, and educator at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Karamu House in the Fairfax neighborhood on the east side of Cleveland, Ohio, United States, is the oldest African-American theater in the United States opening in 1915. Many of Langston Hughes's plays were developed and premièred at the theater.
The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925) is an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays on African and African-American art and literature edited by Alain Locke, who lived in Washington, DC, and taught at Howard University during the Harlem Renaissance. As a collection of the creative efforts coming out of the burgeoning New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance, the book is considered by literary scholars and critics to be the definitive text of the movement. "The Negro Renaissance" included Locke's title essay "The New Negro", as well as nonfiction essays, poetry, and fiction by writers including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Eric Walrond.
Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Richard Bruce Nugent, aka Richard Bruce and Bruce Nugent, was a gay writer and painter in the Harlem Renaissance. Despite being a part of a group of many gay Harlem artists, Nugent was among only a few who were publicly out. Recognized initially for the few short stories and paintings that were published, Nugent had a long productive career bringing to light the creative process of gay and black culture.
Tongues Untied is a 1989 American experimental documentary film directed by Marlon T. Riggs, and featuring Riggs, Essex Hemphill and Brian Freeman. The film seeks, in its author's words to, "...shatter the nation's brutalizing silence on matters of sexual and racial difference."
Arnold Rampersad is a biographer, literary critic, and academic, who was born in Trinidad and Tobago and moved to the US in 1965. The first volume (1986) of his Life of Langston Hughes was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and his Ralph Ellison: A Biography was a finalist for the 2007 National Book Award.
The Langston Hughes Medal has been awarded annually 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 American 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 LHF’s Advisory Committee reviews the work of major black writers from Africa to America whose work is accessed as likely having a lasting impact on world literature.".
Essex Hemphill was an openly gay American poet and activist. He is known for his contributions to the Washington, D.C. art scene in the 1980s, and for openly discussing the topics pertinent to the African-American gay community.
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 of 2004.
Fire!! was an African-American literary magazine published in New York City in 1926 during the Harlem Renaissance. The publication was started by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Grandison Alexander, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. The magazine's title referred to burning up old ideas, and Fire!! challenged the norms of the older Black generation while featuring younger authors. The publishers promoted a realistic style, with vernacular language and controversial topics such as homosexuality and prostitution. Many readers were offended, and some Black leaders denounced the magazine. The endeavor was plagued by debt, and its quarters burned down, ending the magazine after just one issue.
The Harlem Renaissance was an intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship centered in Harlem, Manhattan, New York City, spanning the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after The New Negro, a 1925 anthology edited by Alain Locke. The movement also included the new African American cultural expressions across the urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest United States affected by a renewed militancy in the general struggle for civil rights, combined with the Great Migration of African American workers fleeing the racist conditions of the Jim Crow Deep South, as Harlem was the final destination of the largest number of those who migrated north.
The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance by Sandra L. West and Aberjhani, is a 2003 encyclopedia of the lives, events, and culture of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s to 1940s. An ebook edition was published through Infobase Publishing in 2010.
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."
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.
"The Negro Speaks of Rivers" is a poem by American writer Langston Hughes. Hughes wrote the poem when he was 17 and crossing the Mississippi River on the way to visit his father in Mexico. It was first published the following year in The Crisis, starting Hughes's literary career. "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" uses rivers as a metaphor for Hughes's life and the bolder African-American experience. It has been reprinted often and is considered one of Hughes's most famous and signature works.
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.
"Harlem" is a poem by Langston Hughes. These eleven lines ask, "What happens to a dream deferred?", providing reference to the African-American experience. It was published as part of a longer volume-length poem suite in 1951 called Montage of a Dream Deferred, but is often excerpted from the larger work. The play A Raisin in the Sun was titled after a line in the poem.
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.
