African American Author -

Ida B. Wells Honored with Posthumous Pulitzer | EJI, A History of Racial Justice

May 6, 2020May 6, 2020African American Author, Black Author

The Pulitzer Prizes announced today that a special citation has been awarded to anti-lynching crusader and pioneering journalist Ida B. Wells “[f]or her outstanding and courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans during the era of lynching.” Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862. At 18, she […]

Georgia poet and Emory professor Jericho Brown awarded the Pulitzer | AJC

May 5, 2020May 5, 2020African American Author, Poetry ...

Pulitzer judges: Brown’s poems ‘combine delicacy with historical urgency’ Emory University professor Jericho Brown has won the Pulitzer Prize for his poetry collection, “The Tradition.” In awarding it Monday, the Pulitzer Prize Board described his work as a “collection of masterful lyrics that combine delicacy with historical urgency in their loving evocation of bodies vulnerable to hostility and […]

Colson Whitehead wins the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Nickel Boys | Vox

May 5, 2020May 5, 2020African American Author, Black Author

Colson Whitehead just became the fourth writer ever to win two Pulitzers for fiction. Colson Whitehead has won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his 2019 novel Nickel Boys. The win comes just three years after Whitehead won the Prize for his 2016 novel The Underground Railroad, making Whitehead the fourth writer ever to have won the Pulitzer […]

NK Jemisin: ‘It’s easier to get a book set in black Africa published if you’re white’ | The Guardian

May 3, 2020May 3, 2020African American Author, African American Literature ...

The three-time Hugo award winner is one of the biggest names in modern scifi. She talks about overcoming racism to rewrite the future In 2018, NK Jemisin became the first writer ever to win three consecutive Hugo best novel awards for science fiction and fantasy. Her first award had been in 2016, for her novel The […]

Between Portland and Park (The Loss of Innocence) | Medium

April 27, 2020June 14, 2020African American Author, African American Literature ...

By William Spivey, Medium It was 1961 in south Minneapolis. Portland Ave and Park Ave were parallel streets separated by Oakland Ave in the middle. Portland and Park are one-way streets, going opposite directions and were the primary thoroughfares heading north and south respectively. This was prior to the construction of Interstate 35 which became […]

A Curriculum for Black Youth Activism | AAUP

February 21, 2020April 9, 2020African American Activist, African American Author ...

What is the source of black youth activism? What nurtures it, and how has it evolved over time? Shelter in a Time of Storm: How Black Colleges Fostered Generations of Leadership and Activism By Jelani M. Favors. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. What is the source of black youth activism? What nurtures […]

Author of ‘Decolonial Daughter’ discusses motherhood, racism and her letters to her European son | New York Amsterdam News

February 21, 2020February 21, 2020African American Author

Brooklyn-born author Lesley-Ann Brown decided to write her book, “Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to Her European Son” to express all of the intricacies of life and Blackness in extremely different geographical settings. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] Brown moved to Copenhagen, Denmark 18 years ago, where she had a son. The book is a collection […]

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates review – time traveller on the Underground Railroad | The Guardian

February 3, 2020February 5, 2020African American Author, Black Author ...

Magical realism meets real life in the acclaimed journalist’s debut novel about American slaves escaping to the north [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] A former national correspondent for the Atlantic magazine, Ta-Nehisi Coates is among the most revered and widely read intellectuals in the US. His bleak but scintillating book about race, We Were Eight Years in Power […]

10 James Baldwin Books to Read in Your Lifetime | The Oprah Magazine

January 14, 2020January 27, 2020African American Activist, African American Author ...

More from the literary legend behind If Beale Street Could Talk. [mc4wp_form id=”6042″] James Baldwin is an iconic author for our time, a writer who gave the world countless poignant essays, shorts stories, novels, plays, and poems during his 63 years. As a gay Black man coming to terms with his identity in the 1950s, […]

In the 2010s, White America Was Finally Shown Itself Ta-Nehisi Coates on “Obama’s decade,” reparations, and Kaepernick. | The Intelligencer

November 26, 2019November 26, 2019African American Activist, African American Author

If the racial politics of the 2010s has a definitive chronicler, it is Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose magisterial 2014 Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations” forced Americans to reckon with slavery, Jim Crow, and redlining in ways that many of them never had. Since the essay’s publication — which eventually prompted a congressional hearing on the […]