Contributors
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Ai is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Cruelty (1973), Killing Floor (1979), Sin (1986), Fate (1991), and Greed (1993). Her most recent work, Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999) won the National Book Award.
Elizabeth Alexander is currently a fellow at the Whitney Humanities Center, Yale University. She is the author of two collections of poems, The Venus Hottentot and Body of Life.
Gerald Barrax was Professor of English, Poet-in-Residence, and Editor of Obsidian at North Carolina State University at Raleigh. He is the author of five volumes of poems, Another Kind of Rain, An Audience of One, The Deaths of Animals and Lesser Gods, Leaning Against the Sun, and From a Person Sitting in Darkness: Selected and New Poems. He is retired and lives in West Chester, Pennsylvania.
Robert Berrouët-Oriol was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where in 1991 he returned from Canada to work with the media. He is a poet and linguist, and the author of Lettres urbaines [Urban Letters], a collection of poems.
Edward Kamau Brathwaite is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Born and raised in Barbados and educated in England, he is the author of a wide array of poetic collections, including Arrivants (1973), Black + Blues (1979), Roots (1993), and Ancestors (2001), collecting in one volume a trilogy—Mother Poem, Sun Poem and X/Self—first published by Oxford University Press between 1977 and 1987. Brathwaite is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, the Casa de las Américas Premio, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Fulbright Fellowship. His scholarly works include The Folk Culture of the Slaves in Jamaica (1970), The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (1971) and History of the Voice (1984).
Cyrus Cassells has, in the course of his career, been a film critic, an actor, a teacher, and a translator. He has received numerous fellowships and awards, including the Pushcart Prize, a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship, and a Lambda Literary Award. Beautiful Signor, Soul Make a Path Through Shouting, and The Mud Actor are some of his publications.
Aimé Césaire, a reknowned politician, scholar and poet, was born in 1913 in Martinique. He is perhaps best known for Return to My Native Land (1939), Discourse on Colonialism (1955), and A Tempest (1968), an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. Many of his poems are reprinted in Aimé Césaire: Collected Works. With Léopold Senghor, he founded Negritude, an influential movement to restore the cultural identity of black Africans, and began the journal Tropiques in 1941.
Lucille Clifton, Poet Laureate of the State of Maryland (1975-85), was recently awarded the National Book Award for her Blessing the Boats (2000). For her numerous books of poetry she has received many fellowships and awards, including the Shelley Memorial Prize, a Charity Randall Citation, an Emmy Award from the [End Page 940] American Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, a selection as a Literary Lion by the New York Public Library, a Lannan Achievement Award in Poetry, and the 1999 Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Writers' Award. She serves on the board of Chancellors of the Academy of American Poets and was recently elected as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts. Her poetry collection, The Terrible Stories (1996), was a finalist for the National Book Award, the Lenore Marshall Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.
Toi Derricotte is author of four books of poetry and a memoir, The Black Notebooks. The Black Notebooks won the Annisfield-Wolf Award in nonfiction and the nonfiction award from the Black Caucus of the American Library Association in 1997. Her latest book of poems, Tender, won the Paterson Poetry Prize in 1998. She is cofounder (with Cornelius Eady) of Cave Canem, the first workshop for African-American poets.
Melvin Dixon (1950-1992) was a professor of English at Queens College in New York. His numerous publications include Love's Instruments (poems) and Vanishing Rooms (novel). He died of complications of AIDS-HIV in 1992.
Rita Dove, Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia, is former Poet Laureate of the United States. Thomas...
