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American Book Award
The American Book Award was established in 1978 by the Before Columbus Foundation. It seeks to recognize outstanding literary achievement by contemporary American authors, without restriction to race, sex, ethnic background, or genre. This should not be confused with the National Book Awards which...
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Cecil Brown
Cecil Brown (September 14, 1907 in New Brighton, Pennsylvania – October 25, 1987) was the author of the book Suez to Singapore, which describes the sinking of HMS Repulse in December 1941. He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, at 6410...
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Ronald Takaki
Ronald Takaki (April 12, 1939 - May 26, 2009) was an academic, historian, ethnographer and author. Born in Oahu, Hawai'i, his work addresses stereotypes of Asian Americans, such as the model minority concept.
Ronald Takaki was raised in a low-income...
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David Halberstam
David Halberstam (April 10, 1934 – April 23, 2007) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author known for his early work on the Vietnam War, his work on politics, history, business, media, American culture, and his later sports...
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. (born May 8, 1937) is an American novelist based in New York City and noted for his dense and complex works of fiction. Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon spent two years in the United States Navy and earned an English...
Douglas Hofstadter
Douglas Richard Hofstadter (born February 15, 1945 in New York, New York) is an American academic whose research focuses on consciousness, thinking and creativity. He is best known for his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, first...
Ed Dorn
Edward Merton Dorn (April 2, 1929 — December 10, 1999) was an American poet and teacher often associated with the Black Mountain poets. His most famous work is Gunslinger.
Edward Merton Dorn was born in Villa Grove, Illinois and grew up in rural...
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Jayne Cortez
Jayne Cortez (born May 10, 1936 Fort Huachuca, Arizona) is an American poet, and performance artist.
She grew up in California. She is the author of ten books of poems and performer of her poetry with music on nine recordings. Her voice is...
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Quincy Troupe
Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr., born July 23, 1943, in St Louis , Missouri, is a poet, editor (recently the Styx River Magazine and Black Renaissance Noire), journalist, and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla,...
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Douglas Woolf
Douglas Woolf (March 23, 1922 - January 18, 1992) was an American author of short stories, novels and book reviews.
Woolf studied at Harvard University from 1939 until 1942. He also studied at the University of New Mexico, and the University of...
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Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge (born October 5, 1947 Beijing, China) is a contemporary poet. Winner of two American Book Awards, her work is often associated with the Language School, the poetry of the New York School, phenomenology, and visual art. She is...
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Milton Murayama
Milton Murayama (born April 10, 1923, Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii) is an American Nisei novelist and playwright. His first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body (1975) is considered a classic novel of the experiences of Japanese Americans in Hawaii before...
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Susan Howe
Susan Howe (10 June 1937 in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American poet and critic who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others. Her work has often been classified as Postmodern, and it expands traditional notions of genre ...
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Toni Cade Bambara
Toni Cade Bambara (March 25, 1939 – December 9, 1995) was an American author, social activist, and college professor.
Bambara was born Miltona Mirkin Cade on March 25, 1939. She grew up in Harlem, Brooklyn, and Jersey City. She attended schools in...
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Miguel Algarín
Miguel Algarín (September 11, 1941), is a Puerto Rican poet, writer, co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and retired Rutgers University professor of English.
Algarín was born in Puerto Rico and was educated and raised in culturally-minded...
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Bienvenido Santos
Bienvenido N. Santos (1911-1996) is a Filipino-American fictionist, poet and nonfiction writer. He was born and raised in Tondo, Manila. His family roots are originally from Lubao, Pampanga, Philippines. He lived in the United States for many years...
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Helen Adam
Helen Adam (b. December 2, 1909 in Glasgow, Scotland — d. September 19, 1993 in New York City) was an American poet, collagist and photographer who was an active participant in The San Francisco Renaissance, a literary movement contemporaneous to...
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Nicholasa Mohr
Nicholasa Mohr (born November 1, 1938) is one of the best known Nuyorican writers. Her works tell of growing up in the Puerto Rican communities of the Bronx and El Barrio and of the difficulties Puerto Rican women face in the United States.
She was...
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Peter Blue Cloud
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Robert Kelly
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Alta.
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Alan Chong Lau
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Leslie Marmon Silko
Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon on March 5, 1948 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) to Leland Howard Marmon (a photographer) and Mary Virginia Leslie, is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second...
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, educator, scholar, writer, editor and public intellectual. He was the first African American to receive the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship. He has received...
Jerome Rothenberg
Jerome Rothenberg (born 1931) is an internationally known American poet, translator and anthologist who is noted for his work in ethnopoetics and poetry performance.
Jerome Rothenberg was born and raised in New York City, the son of Polish-Jewish...
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Al Young
Al Young (May 31, 1939, Ocean Springs, Mississippi) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and professor. On May 15, 2005 he was named Poet Laureate of California by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. In appointing Young as Poet...
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Judy Yung
Judy Yung is professor emerita in American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She specializes in oral history, women's history, and Chinese American and Asian American history.
She is author of Island: Poetry and History of Chinese...
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Tato Laviera
Tato Laviera (born 1951) is a Nuyorican poet, was born in Puerto Rico but moved to New York in 1960.
Laviera's poetry addresses language (and is written sometimes in Spanish, sometimes in English, more often in Spanglish), cultural identity, race,...
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Him Mark Lai
Him Mark Lai (麥禮謙) (November 11, 1925 - May 21, 2009) was an American historian. Born in San Francisco, he was known as the “Dean of Chinese American History” by his academic peers, despite the fact that he was professionally trained as a...
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Lorna Dee Cervantes
Lorna Dee Cervantes (b. August 6, 1954, in San Francisco, California) is an award-winning Chicana-Native American poet who is considered one of the major Chicana poets of the past 40 years. She has been described by Alurista, as "probably the best...
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Duane Niatum
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Hilton Obenzinger
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Genny Lim
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E. L. Mayo
Edward Leslie Mayo (b. July 26, 1904, Dorchester, Massachusetts - December 1979, Grinnell, Iowa) was an American poet.
He attended schools in Malden, Massachusetts, then Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
For three years thereafter he held...
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Peter Guralnick
Peter Guralnick (born December 15, 1943, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American music critic, writer on music, and historian of US American popular music, who is also active as an author and screenwriter. He has been married for over 45 years to...
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Joy Kogawa
Joy Nozomi Kogawa, CM, OBC (born June 6, 1935) is a Canadian poet and novelist of Japanese descent. Born Joy Nozomi Nakayama in Vancouver, British Columbia, she was sent to internment camps in the Slocan and Coaldale, Alberta during World War II....
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Judy Grahn
Judy Rae Grahn (born July 28, 1940, in Chicago) is an American poet. She has written many lesbian / feminist works.
Judy Grahn is a poet who writes about women's lives, including lesbian experience. She was a member of the Gay Women's Liberation...
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Jessica Hagedorn
Jessica Tarahata Hagedorn was born (and raised) in Manila, Philippines in 1949. With her background, a Scots-Irish-French-Filipino mother and a Filipino-Spanish father with one Chinese ancestor, Hagedorn adds a unique perspective to Asian American...
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Gloria Naylor
Gloria Naylor (born January 25, 1950 in New York City) is an African American novelist. Her novel The Women of Brewster Place was adapted into a 1989 film of the same name by Oprah Winfrey's Harpo Productions.
She was the first child to Roosevelt...
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John A. Williams
John Alfred Williams (born 5 December 1925) is an African American author, journalist and academic.
Williams was born in Jackson, Mississippi, and, after naval service in World War II, graduated in 1950 from Syracuse University. His novels, which...
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Joyce Carol Thomas
Joyce Carol Thomas (born May 25, 1938) is an African-American playwright, author and illustrator of more than 50 children's books. She was born in Ponca City, Oklahoma and currently lives in Berkeley, California. She moved with her family in 1948 to...
Barbara Christian
Barbara Christian (b. Dec 12, 1943, St. Thomas, Virgin Islands; d. June 25, 2000 Berkeley, California) was an author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. Among several books, and over 100 published...
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Nash Candelaria
Nash Candelaria (born 7 May 1928) is a Mexican American novelist. He is known for a tetralogy of novels about the Rafa family. He has been called the "historical novelist of the Hispanic people of New Mexico."
Candelaria was born in Los Angeles, but...
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Seán Ó Tuama
Seán Ó Tuama (1926 – 2006) was an Irish poet, playwright and academic.
Raised in Cork city and educated at the North Monastery (North Mon) school and University College Cork, Ó Tuama first came to prominence in 1950 with his anthology of modern...
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James D. Houston
James Dudley Houston (November 10, 1933 – April 16, 2009) was an American novelist. He wrote nine novels in total.
Houston was born in San Francisco, where his parents had migrated from Quanah, Texas, a small town near the Oklahoma panhandle. Their...
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Cecilia Liang
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William Kennedy
William Joseph Kennedy (born January 16, 1928) is an American writer and journalist born and raised in Albany, New York. Many of his novels feature the interaction of members of the fictional Irish-American Phelan family, and make use of incidents...
Jesús Colón
Jesús Colón (1901-1974) born in Cayey, Puerto Rico is a Puerto Rican writer known as the Father of the Nuyorican Movement.
Colón was born after the Spanish-American War when the American Tobacco Company gained control of most of the tobacco...
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Maurice Kenney
Maurice Kenny is a Mohawk poet.
Maurice Kenny was born in Watertown, New York in 1929. His father is Mohawk from Canada, his mother was born in upstate New York. The family spent time living both on and off the nearby reservation.
Kenny's father was...
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Thomas McGrath
Thomas Matthew McGrath, American poet, born November 20, 1916 near Sheldon, North Dakota, died September 20 1990, Minneapolis, Minnesota. McGrath grew up on a farm in Ransom County, North Dakota. He earned a B.A. from the University of North Dakota...
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Mark Podwal
Mark Podwal (born June 8, 1945) is an artist, author and physician. He may be best known for his drawings on The New York Times OP-ED page. In addition, he is the author and illustrator of books for children as well as for adults. Most of these...
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Joseph Bruchac
Joseph Bruchac (born 1942) is a writer of books relating to the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, with a particular focus on northeastern Native American and Anglo-American lives and folklore. He has published works of poetry, novels, and short...
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Miné Okubo
Miné Okubo (first name pronounced MEE-NEH), a pioneering Nisei woman, artist and writer, created approximately 2000 drawings and sketches of her experiences while confined along with approximately 110,000 Japanese Americans in US internment camps...
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Howard Schwartz
Howard Schwartz (born April 4, 1945 in St. Louis, Missouri) is a widely regarded folklorist, author, poet, and editor of dozens of books. He has won the international Koret Jewish Book Award, for the book Before You Were Born, and won the 2005...
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