In literary criticism, a Bildungsroman is a literary genre that focuses on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from childhood to adulthood, in which character change is important. The term comes from the German words Bildung and Roman ("novel").
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries suffering discrimination and violence. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1934.
Joyce Carol Oates is an American writer. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and non-fiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collections The Wheel of Love (1970) and Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award, for her novel them (1969), two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019).
Stephen Lisle Carter is an American legal scholar who serves as the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School. He writes on legal and social issues.
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.
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.
Jabari Asim is an author, poet, playwright, and professor of writing, literature and publishing at Emerson College in Boston, Massachusetts. He is the former editor-in-chief of The Crisis magazine, a journal of politics, ideas and culture published by the NAACP and founded by historian and social activist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910. In February 2019 he was named Emerson College's inaugural Elma Lewis '43 Distinguished Fellow in the Social Justice Center. In September 2022 he was named Emerson College Distinguished Professor of Multidisciplinary Letters.
Jesmyn Ward is an American novelist and a Professor of English at Tulane University, where she holds the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. She won the 2011 National Book Award for Fiction for her second novel Salvage the Bones and won the 2017 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel Sing, Unburied, Sing. She also received a 2012 Alex Award for the story about familial love and community in facing Hurricane Katrina. She is the only woman and only African American to win the National Book Award for Fiction twice. All three of Ward's novels are set in the fictitious Mississippi town of Bois Sauvage.
Agate Publishing is an independent small press book publisher based in Evanston, Illinois. The company, incorporated in 2002 with its first book published in 2003, was founded by current president Doug Seibold. At its inception, Agate was synonymous with its Bolden imprint, which published exclusively African-American literature, an interest of Seibold's and a product of his time working as executive editor for the defunct African-American publisher Noble Press.
The Black Caucus of the American Library Association (BCALA) is an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA) that focuses on the needs of African-American library professionals by promoting careers in librarianship, funding literacy initiatives, and providing scholarships.
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.
The Emperor of Ocean Park is a 2002 novel by American author and law professor Stephen L. Carter. It is the first part of Carter's Elm Harbor series; two more novels in the series were published in 2007 and 2008. The book was Carter's first work of fiction, and spent 11 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list following its publication. Described as a murder mystery, the novel tells the story of Talcott Garland, a law professor who uncovers a mystery surrounding his father, the titular 'Emperor of Ocean Park'. Written from Tal's first person perspective, the book explores themes of privileged black identity, politics, and law, and contains many allusions to chess.
Adrian Miller is an American culinary historian, lawyer and public policy advisor. His books have twice won the James Beard Foundation Book Award for Reference and Scholarship: Soul Food in 2014 and Black Smoke in 2022. He is also the author of The President's Kitchen Cabinet, which was nominated for a 2018 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work – Nonfiction. He also served as a White House advisor to U.S. president Bill Clinton.
Palace Council is a 2008 thriller novel by American author Stephen L. Carter. The book was Carter's third work of fiction.
Yvvette Edwards FRSL is a British novelist born in London, England, of Caribbean heritage. Her first novel, A Cupboard Full of Coats, was published in 2011 to much acclaim and prize nominations that included the Man Booker Prize longlist and the Commonwealth Book Prize shortlist. Edwards followed this debut work five years later with The Mother (2016), a novel that "reinforces her accomplishment". She is a contributor to the 2019 anthology New Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.
Tiffany D. Jackson is a New York Times Bestselling American author of young adult fiction and a horror filmmaker, best known for her NAACP Image Award-nominated debut novel Allegedly.
Jesse James Holland Jr. is an American journalist, author, television personality and educator. He was one of the first African American journalists assigned to cover the Supreme Court full-time, and only the second African American editor of The Daily Mississippian, the college newspaper of the University of Mississippi. He was the former Visiting Distinguished Professor of Ethics in Journalism at the University of Arkansas, and now serves as a guest host on C-SPAN's Washington Journal.
Incendiary Art is a collection of poems written by American poet, Patricia Smith. It was published on February 15, 2017, by TriQuarterly Books, an imprint of Northwestern University Press. This collection was written as a response to the violent deaths of African American males and females in the United States, with a focus on the grief of the mothers who try to protect them, to no avail. Its title is a reference to the role of fire in African American lives, including the burning of Ku Klux Klan crosses and the burning spurred by riots in Black communities across America.
Natashia Deón is an American novelist, attorney, and activist. She was an NAACP Image Awards Nominee for her debut novel, Grace which also won the 2017 American Library Association's Black Caucus Award for Best Debut Fiction and was named one of The New York Times Critics’ Top Books of 2016 by critic Jennifer Senior. Her second novel, The Perishing, is slated to be released November 2, 2021.
