James Weldon Johnson was an American writer and civil rights activist. He was married to civil rights activist Grace Nail Johnson. Johnson was a leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), where he started working in 1917. In 1920, he was chosen as executive secretary of the organization, effectively the operating officer. He served in that position from 1920 to 1930. Johnson established his reputation as a writer, and was known during the Harlem Renaissance for his poems, novel and anthologies collecting both poems and spirituals of Black culture. He wrote the lyrics for "Lift Every Voice and Sing", which later became known as the Black National Anthem, the music being written by his younger brother, composer J. Rosamond Johnson.
War poetry is poetry on the topic of war. While the term is applied especially to works of the First World War, the term can be applied to poetry about any war, including Homer's Iliad, from around the 8th century BC as well as poetry of the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Crimean War and other wars. War poets may be combatants or noncombatants.
Arna Wendell Bontemps was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.
James Harold Kirkup was an English poet, translator and travel writer. He wrote more than 45 books, including autobiographies, novels and plays. He wrote under many pen-names including James Falconer, Aditya Jha, Jun Honda, Andrew James, Taeko Kawai, Felix Liston, Edward Raeburn, and Ivy B. Summerforest. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962.
Naomi Long Madgett was an American poet and publisher. Originally a teacher, she later found fame with her award-winning poems and was also the founder and senior editor of Lotus Press, established in 1972, a publisher of poetry books by black poets. Known as "the godmother of African-American poetry", she was the Detroit poet laureate since 2001.
Kwame Senu Neville Dawes is a Ghanaian poet, actor, editor, critic, musician, and former Louis Frye Scudder Professor of Liberal Arts at the University of South Carolina. He is now Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and editor-in-chief at Prairie Schooner magazine.
Leslie Allan Murray was an Australian poet, anthologist and critic. His career spanned over 40 years and he published nearly 30 volumes of poetry as well as two verse novels and collections of his prose writings.
Patricia Smith is an American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, writing teacher, and former journalist. She has published poems in literary magazines and journals including TriQuarterly, Poetry, The Paris Review, Tin House, and in anthologies including American Voices and The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry. She is on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.
David Dabydeen FRSL is a Guyanese-born broadcaster, novelist, poet and academic. He was formerly Guyana's Ambassador to UNESCO from 1997 to 2010, and was the youngest Member of the UNESCO Executive Board (1993–1997), elected by the General Council of all Member States of UNESCO. He was appointed Guyana's Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinaire to China, from 2010 to 2015. He is one of the longest serving diplomats in the history of Guyana, most of his work done in a voluntary unpaid capacity. He is a cousin of Guyana-born Canadian writer Cyril Dabydeen.
Grace Nichols FRSL is a Guyanese poet who moved to Britain in 1977, before which she worked as a teacher and journalist in Guyana. Her first collection, I is a Long-Memoried Woman (1983), won the Commonwealth Poetry Prize. In December 2021, she was announced as winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
Robert Fleming is an American journalist and writer of erotic fiction and horror fiction. He is also a contributing editor for Black Issues Book Review. He began writing in the early 1970s while studying full-time for a degree in psychology at a local college.
Amiri Baraka, previously known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays, and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at several universities, including the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University. He received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone. Baraka's plays, poetry, and essays have been described by scholars as constituting defining texts for African-American culture.
William Stanley Beaumont Braithwaite was an African-American writer, poet, literary critic, anthologist, and publisher in the United States. His work as a critic and anthologist was widely praised and important in the development of East Coast poetry styles in the early 20th century. He was awarded the Spingarn Medal in 1918.
Clarence Major is an American poet, painter, and novelist; winner of the 2015 "Lifetime Achievement Award in the Fine Arts", presented by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. He was awarded the 2016 PEN Oakland/Reginald Lockett Lifetime Achievement Award.
Sitakant Mahapatra is an Indian poet and literary critic in Odia as well as English. He served in the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) from 1961 until he retired in 1995, and has held ex officio posts such as the Chairman of National Book Trust, New Delhi since then.
Joseph Woods is an Irish poet born in Drogheda, Ireland. He moved with his family to Harare, Zimbabwe in 2016, where he works as a poet, writer and editor.
Neil Astley, Hon. FRSL is an English publisher, editor and writer. He is best known as the founder of the poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books.
Osborne Henry Kwesi Brew was a Ghanaian poet and diplomat.
The Black Scholar (TBS) is a journal founded in California, in 1969, by Robert Chrisman, Nathan Hare, and Allan Ross. It is the third oldest Black studies journal in the US, after the NAACP’s The Crisis and the Journal of African American History. The journal is currently housed at Boston University's Program in African American Studies. Originally published 10 times a year, and without peer review, the journal introduced peer review and became a quarterly in 2015.
Robert Chrisman was a poet, scholar, and founding editor and publisher of The Black Scholar (TBS). Chrisman and the internationally acclaimed
Chrisman, L., 1996. "earthstepper / the ocean is very shallow: Poetry by Seithlamo Motsapi." "The Black Scholar", 26 (2), 33-36.
