It’s the birthday of Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002), whose more than 40 works of “liberation literature” spanned everything from science fiction to folk stories to biography and who was the first black author to win a Newbery Award (1975) and the first children’s author to win a MacArthur “genius” grant (1995). Hamilton was born in Yellow [...]
It’s the birthday of Ernest James Gaines (b. 1933), whose novels are set in a fictional plantation area in rural Louisiana and who is best known for the highly-acclaimed novels The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). (NB: This post contains no description of disembowelment and no mention whatsoever [...]
It’s the birthday of two African American female authors, Ann Petry (1908-1997) and Alice Childress (1916-1994), both of whom broke new literary ground in their own ways. Petry was born Ann Lane and raised in Old Saybrook, a small town in Connecticut, where her father was a pharmacist and ran his own pharmacy; in fact, [...]