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Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards are a United States literary award dedicated to honoring written works that make important contributions to our understanding of racism and our appreciation of the rich diversity of human culture. Established in 1935 by Cleveland poet and philanthropist Edith...
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Louise Erdrich
Karen Louise Erdrich, known as Louise Erdrich, (born June 7, 1954) is a Native American author of novels, poetry, and children's books. She is an enrolled member of the Anishinaabe nation (also known as Ojibwa and Chippewa) and also has German,...
Annette Gordon-Reed
Annette Gordon-Reed (born November 19, 1958 in Conroe, Texas) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American historian and law professor. Gordon-Reed was educated at Dartmouth College and Harvard Law School and is now the Wallace Stevens professor of law at...
Nam Le
Nam Le (born 1978) is a Vietnamese-born Australian writer, who won the Dylan Thomas Prize for his book The Boat, a collection of short stories. His stories have been published in many places including Best Australian Stories 2007, Best New American...
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Paule Marshall
Paule Marshall (born April 9, 1929) is an American author. She was born Valenza Pauline Burke in Brooklyn to Barbadian parents and educated at Brooklyn College (1953) and Hunter College (1955). Early in her career, she wrote poetry, but later...
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Mohsin Hamid
Mohsin Hamid (born 1971) is a Pakistani author best known for his novels Moth Smoke (2000) and The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007).
Hamid spent part of his childhood in the United States, where he stayed from the age of 3 to 9 while his father, a...
Junot Díaz
Junot Díaz (born 31 December 1968) is a Dominican-American writer and creative writing professor at MIT. Central to Díaz's work is the duality of the immigrant experience. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel, The Brief Wondrous...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
Ayaan Hirsi Ali ( pronunciation (help·info); Somali: Ayaan Xirsi Cali; born Ayaan Hirsi Magan 13 November 1969 in Somalia) is a Dutch intellectual, feminist activist, writer, and politician. She is the estranged daughter of the Somali scholar,...
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William Melvin Kelley
William Melvin Kelley (born November 1, 1937), is a prominent African American novelist and short-story writer. He is most well-known for the book A Different Drummer. He has won, among other things, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in 2008 for...
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Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born September 15, 1977) is an acclaimed Nigerian writer. She comes from Abba in Anambra State, southeast Nigeria. Her family is of Igbo descent.
She was born in the town of Enugu but grew up in the university town of...
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Taylor Branch
Taylor Branch (born January 14, 1947, in Atlanta, Georgia) is an American author and historian best known for his award-winning trilogy of books chronicling the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. and some of the history of the American civil rights...
Martha Collins
Martha Collins was (born 1940 Omaha, Nebraska) is an American poet.
She graduated from Stanford University with a B.A., and holds the University of Iowa with a Ph.D.
She taught at University of Massachusetts Boston; she teaches at Oberlin College....
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Scott Reynolds Nelson
Scott Reynolds Nelson is the Legum Professor of History at the College of William and Mary. He is a historian of the American Civil War and the Gilded Age. He specializes in African-American history and Labor history.
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Zadie Smith
Zadie Smith (born 25 October 1975) is an English novelist. To date she has written three novels. In 2003, she was included on Granta's list of 20 best young authors.
Zadie Smith was born Sadie Smith in the northwest London borough of Brent – a...
Jill Lepore
Jill Lepore is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and chair of Harvard's History and Literature Program. She is a contributing writer at The New Yorker, and her essays and reviews have also appeared in The...
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August Wilson
August Wilson (April 27, 1945 – October 2, 2005) was an American playwright. His literary legacy is the ten play series, The Pittsburgh Cycle, for which he received two Pulitzer Prizes for Drama. Each is set in a different decade, depicting the...
Geoffrey Ward
Geoffrey Champion Ward (born November 30, 1940) is an author and screenwriter of various documentary presentations of American history. He graduated from Oberlin College in 1962.
He was an editor of American Heritage magazine early in his career. He...
Edwidge Danticat
Edwidge Danticat (pronounced: Dahn-tee-kah; born January 19, 1969) is a Haitian-born American author.
Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. When she was two years old, her father André emigrated to New York, to be followed two years later by...
Derek Walcott
Derek Alton Walcott (born January 23, 1930) is a Caribbean poet, playwright, writer and visual artist. Born in Castries, St. Lucia, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.
His work, which developed independently of the schools of magic...
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc is an American journalist whose works focus on the marginalized members of society: adolescents living in poverty, prostitutes, women in prison, etc.
LeBlanc grew up in a working class family in Leominster, Massachusetts. She...
Edward P. Jones
Edward P. Jones is an African American author and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Born in 1951, he was raised in Washington, D.C. and educated at both the College of the Holy Cross and the University of Virginia.
He won both the Pen...
Ira Berlin
Ira Berlin (born 1941) is an American historian, a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, and a past President of the Organization of American Historians. Berlin is the author of such books as Many Thousands Gone and...
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Reetika Vazirani
Reetika Vazirani (1962-2003) was an award-winning American poet and educator. On July 16, 2003, Vazirani was housesitting in the Chevy Chase, Maryland home of novelist Howard Norman and his wife, the poet, Jane Shore. There, Vazirani took the life...
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Samantha Power
Samantha Power (born September 21, 1970, in Ireland) is an Irish American journalist, writer, academic, and government official. She is currently affiliated with the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of...
Adrienne Kennedy
Adrienne Kennedy is an African-American playwright and was a key figure in the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She is best known for her first major play Funnyhouse of a Negro. Many of Kennedy's plays explore issues of race, kinship, and...
Stephen L. Carter
Stephen L. Carter (born October 26, 1954) is an American law professor, legal- and social-policy writer, columnist, and best-selling novelist. He is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law at Yale Law School, where he has taught since...
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Jay Wright
Jay Wright (born 1935) is an African-American poet, playwright and essayist. Born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, he currently lives in Bradford, Vermont. Although his work is not as widely known as other American poets of his generation, it has...
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Colson Whitehead
Colson Whitehead is a New York-based novelist. He is best-known as the author of the 2001 novel John Henry Days. In 2002, he received a MacArthur Fellowship.
Whitehead was born in New York City in 1969, and grew up in Manhattan. He attended the...
Vernon Jordan Jr.
Vernon Eulion Jordan, Jr. (born August 15, 1935) is a lawyer and business executive in the United States. He served as a close adviser to President Bill Clinton and has become known as an influential figure in American politics. Mr. Jordan is an...
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Quincy Jones
Quincy Delight Jones, Jr. (born March 14, 1933) is an American music conductor, record producer, musical arranger, film composer and trumpeter. During five decades in the entertainment industry, Jones has earned a record 79 Grammy Award nominations,...
F.X. Toole
F.X. Toole is the pen name of boxing trainer Jerry Boyd (1930 — September 2, 2002). Toole is most noted for writing the collection of short stories Rope Burns: Stories from the Corner, which were adapted into the Oscar-winning movie Million Dollar...
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David Levering Lewis
David Levering Lewis (born May 25, 1936) is the Julius Silver University Professor and Professor of History at New York University. He is twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, for part one and part two of his biography...
Lucille Clifton
Lucille Clifton (born June 27, 1936) is an American poet, writer, and educator from New York. Common topics in her poetry include the celebration of her African American heritage, and feminist themes, with particular emphasis on the female body....
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd (pronounced /edward wædiːʕ sæʕiːd/ Arabic: إدوارد وديع سعيد, Idwārd Wadīʿ Saʿīd; 1 November 1935 – 25 September 2003) was a Palestinian American literary theorist, cultural critic, and an advocate for Palestinian rights. He was...
Chang-Rae Lee
Chang-Rae Lee (born July 29, 1965) is a first-generation Korean American novelist.
Lee was born in Korea in 1965. He emigrated to the United States with his family when he was 3 years old. Raised in Westchester, New York, Lee attended Phillips...
Ernest Gaines
Ernest J. Gaines (born 15 January 1933) is an American author. His works have been taught in college classrooms and translated into many languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, and Chinese. Four of his works have been produced into...
John Lewis
John Robert Lewis (born February 21, 1940) is an American politician and was a leader in the American Civil Rights Movement. He was chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and played a key role in the struggle to end...
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Mike D'Orso
Mike D'Orso (born October 12, 1953) is an American journalist based in Norfolk, Virginia. He is known as the author of the books Like Judgment Day: The Ruin and Redemption of a Town Called Rosewood (1996) and Eagle Blue: A Team, A Tribe and a High...
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John Hope Franklin
John Hope Franklin (2 January 1915 – 25 March 2009) was a United States historian and past president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. The John...
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Russell Banks
Russell Banks (born March 28, 1940 in Newton, Massachusetts) is an American writer of fiction and poetry.
Banks lives in upstate New York, and has been named a New York State Author. He is presently also Artist-in-Residence at the University of...
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Gordon Parks
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks (November 30, 1912 – March 7, 2006) was a groundbreaking American photographer, musician, poet, novelist, journalist, activist and film director. He is best remembered for his photo essays for Life magazine and...
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Walter Mosley
Walter Ellis Mosley (born January 12, 1952) is a prominent 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...
Toi Derricotte
Toi Derricotte ( pronounced DARE-i-cot ) (b. April 12, 1941 in Hamtramck, Michigan) is an American poet.
At Wayne State University she earned a B.A. in 1965 and an M.A. in 1984 at New York University in English literature.
Derricotte was born the...
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Albert Murray
Albert L. Murray (born May 12, 1916 in Nokomis, Mobile County, Alabama) is an African-American literary and jazz critic, novelist and biographer.
He attended the Tuskegee Institute and received a Bachelors degree in 1939. He later earned a M.A. from...
James McBride
James McBride (born 1957) is an American writer and musician whose compositions have been recorded by a variety of other musicians.
McBride's father, the late Rev. Andrew D. McBride, was African-American, and his mother (Rachel Shilsky later changed...
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Jamaica Kincaid
Jamaica Kincaid (b. Elaine Cynthia Potter Richardson, 25 May 1949 in St. John's, Antigua and Barbuda) is an American novelist, gardener, and gardening writer. She lives with her family in North Bennington, Vermont.
Elaine Richardson lived with her...
Dorothy West
Dorothy West (June 2, 1907 – August 16, 1998) was a novelist and short story writer who was part of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for her novel The Living Is Easy, about the life of an upper-class black family.
West was born in Boston on...
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Madison Smartt Bell
Madison Smartt Bell (born August 1, 1957) is an American novelist. Born and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Bell lived in New York and London before settling in Baltimore, Maryland. He was a graduate of Princeton University, where he won the Ward...
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Jonathan Kozol
Jonathan Kozol (born September 5, 1936 in Boston, Massachusetts) is a non-fiction writer, educator, and activist, best known for his books on public education in the ian. Kozol graduated from Noble and Greenough School in 1954, and Harvard...
William H. Tucker
William H. Tucker is a professor of psychology at Rutgers University and the author of several books critical of race science.
Tucker received his bachelor's degree from Bates College in 1967, and his master's and doctorate from Princeton University...
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Brent Staples
Brent Staples (b. 1951 in Chester, Pennsylvania) is an author and editorial writer for the New York Times. His books include An American Love Story and Parallel Time: Growing up In Black and White, which won the Anisfield Wolff Book Award. Staples...
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Reginald Gibbons
Reginald Gibbons (b. 1947) is an American poet, fiction writer, translator, literary critic, artist, and Professor of English, Classics, and Spanish and Portuguese at Northwestern University. Gibbons has also published numerous essays and reviews,...
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Judith Ortiz Cofer
Judith Ortiz Cofer (born in 1952) is an acclaimed Puerto Rican author. Her works span a range of literary genres including poetry, short stories, autobiography, essays, and Young-adult fiction.
Cofer was born in Hormigueros, Puerto Rico, moved to...
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Marija Gimbutas
Marija Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė) (Vilnius, January 23, 1921 – Los Angeles, United States February 2, 1994), was a Lithuanian-American archeologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe", a...
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Sandra Cisneros
Sandra Cisneros (born December 20,1954) is an American writer best known for her acclaimed first novel The House on Mango Street (1984) and her subsequent short story collection Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories (1991). Her work experiments...
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Kwame Anthony Appiah (born 1954 in London) is a Ghanaian philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. He is currently the...
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Marilyn Nelson
Marilyn Nelson (born 1946) is an American poet, translator and children's book author. She is the author or translator of twelve books and three chapbooks.
Nelson was born on April 26, 1946 in Cleveland, Ohio to Melvin M. Nelson, a U.S. serviceman...
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