Zora Neale Hurston was an American author, anthropologist, and documentary filmmaker. She portrayed racial struggles in the early-20th-century American South and published research on hoodoo. The most popular of her four novels is Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937. She also wrote over 50 short stories, plays, and essays.
Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist and editor. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands. African American writers have been recognized by the highest awards, including the Nobel Prize given to Toni Morrison in 1993. Among the themes and issues explored in this literature are the role of African Americans within the larger American society, African American culture, racism, slavery, and social equality. African-American writing has tended to incorporate oral forms, such as spirituals, sermons, gospel music, blues, or rap.
David Anthony Durham is an American novelist, author of historical fiction and fantasy.
Kim McLarin is an American novelist, best known for Growing Up X: A Memoir by the Daughter of Malcolm X, co-authored with Ilyasah Shabazz, and Jump at the Sun. Her works include contemporary novels, short stories and non-fiction.
The Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards program in the United States honors published Black writers worldwide for literary achievement. Introduced in 2001, the Legacy Award was the first national award presented to Black writers by a national organization of Black writers. It is granted for fiction, nonfiction and poetry, selected in a juried competition.
Cheryl A. Wall was a literary critic and professor of English at Rutgers University. One of the first black women to head an English department at a major research university, she worked for diversity in the literary canon as well as in the classroom. She specialized in black women's writing, particularly the Harlem Renaissance and Zora Neale Hurston. She edited several volumes of Hurston's writings for the Library of America. She was also a section editor for The Norton Anthology of African American Literature and was on the editorial boards of American Literature, African American Review and Signs. An award-winning researcher and teacher, she was named the Board of Governors Zora Neale Hurston Professor in 2007.
Marie-Elena John is an Antiguan writer whose novel, Unburnable, was published in 2006. She is an Africanist, development and women's rights specialist, currently serving as the Senior Racial Justice Lead at UN Women.
Marita Bonner, also known as Marieta Bonner, was an American writer, essayist, and playwright who is commonly associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Other names she went by were Marita Occomy, Marita Odette Bonner, Marita Odette Bonner Occomy, Marita Bonner Occomy, and Joseph Maree Andrew. On December 29, 1921, along with 15 other women, she chartered the Iota chapter of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.
Kalisha Buckhanon is an American author who writes frequently on literature, race and Black women's themes. She was educated at the University of Chicago and New School University. She is a 2006 recipient of the Alex Awards.
Eloise Greenfield was an American children's book and biography author and poet famous for her descriptive, rhythmic style and positive portrayal of the African-American experience.
Jeffery Renard Allen is an American poet, essayist, short story writer and novelist. He is the author of two collections of poetry, Harbors and Spirits and Stellar Places, and four works of fiction, the novel Rails Under My Back, the story collection Holding Pattern a second novel, Song of the Shank, and his most recent book, the short story collection “Fat Time and Other Stories”. He is also the co-author with Leon Ford of “An Unspeakble Hope: Brutality, Forgiveness, and Building A Better Future for My Son”.
Doreen Baingana is a Ugandan writer. Her short story collection, Tropical Fish, won the Grace Paley Award for Short Fiction in 2003 and the Commonwealth Writers' Prize for best first book, Africa Region in 2006. Stories in it were finalists for the Caine Prize in 2004 and 2005. She was a Caine Prize finalist for the third time in 2021 and has received many other awards listed below.
Chinelo Okparanta is a Nigerian-American novelist and short-story writer. She was born in Port Harcourt, Nigeria, where she was raised until the age of 10, when she emigrated to the United States with her family.
Bernice L. McFadden is an American novelist. She has also written humorous erotica under the pseudonym Geneva Holliday. Author of fifteen novels, she is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Tulane University in New Orleans.
Akachi Adimora-Ezeigbo is a Nigerian author and educator, whose published work includes novels, poetry, short stories, books for children, essays and journalism. She is the winner of several awards in Nigeria, including the Nigeria Prize for Literature.
Glory Edim is an American writer and entrepreneur. She is best known as the founder of the reading network Well-Read Black Girl. Edim received the 2017 Innovator's Award at the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for her work.
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.
Marcia Chatelain is an American academic who serves as the Penn Presidential Compact Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2021, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for History for her book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, for which she also won the James Beard Award for Writing in 2022. Chatelain was the first black woman to win the latter award.
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.
