Maya Angelou was an American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist. She published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, several books of poetry, and is credited with a list of plays, movi…
Thomas Sowell is an American economist, social philosopher, and political commentator. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. With widely published commentary and books—and as a guest on TV …
Pablo Neruda, born Ricardo Eliécer Neftalí Reyes Basoalto in 1904 in Parral, Chile, was a poet, diplomat, and politician, widely considered one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th cen…
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts,…
Saul Williams is an acclaimed American poet, musician, actor, and filmmaker whose work fuses raw political insight, lyrical intensity, and a bold disregard for genre boundaries. Widely recognized for …
Emily Dickinson was an American poet who, despite the fact that less than a dozen of her nearly eighteen hundred poems were published during her lifetime, is widely considered one of the most original…
Flinty, moody, plainspoken and deep, Robert Frost was one of America's most popular 20th-century poets. Frost was farming in Derry, New Hampshire when, at the age of 38, he sold the farm, uprooted his…
Mary Jane Oliver was an American poet who won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is inspired by nature, rather than the human world, stemming from her lifelong passion for solita…
Anne Sexton once told a journalist that her fans thought she got better, but actually, she just became a poet. These words are characteristic of a talented poet that received therapy for years, but co…
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for …
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yea…
Through poetry, prose, and drama, American writer James Langston Hughes made important contributions to the Harlem renaissance; his best-known works include Weary Blues (1926) and The Ways of W…
Wallace Henry Thurman (1902–1934) was an American novelist active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary j…
Mary Prince (c. 1788-after 1833) was born into slavery in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda. While she was later living in London, her autobiography, The History of Mary Prince (1831), was the first account …
Poet, activist, playwright and essayist Rachel McKibbens is the author of the poetry collections Into the Dark and Emptying Field (2013) and Pink Elephant (2009). The Rumpus wrote of Pink Elephant, “M…
Works of poetry, history, and fiction, such as God Sends Sunday (1931) and Black Thunder (1936), established American writer Arna Wendell Bontemps as a leading figure of the renaissance of Har…
Jenny Xie is the author of Eye Level (Graywolf Press, 2018), a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN Open Book Award, and the recipient of the W…
