Authors' Birthdays: August

Two African-American U.S. Poet Laureates were born in August.

August 2: James Baldwin (1924-1987) was a novelist, essayist, and playwright who was also known for his civil rights activism. His first novel was Go Tell It on the Mountain. He is also well known for his books of essays including Notes of a Native Son and The Fire Next Time.

August 4: Robert Hayden (1913-1980), in 1976, was the first African American to be named Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (which was also called the Poet Laureate). In 1966, he was awarded the grand prize for poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal. Some of his poetry collections are Ballad of Remembrance, Night-Blooming Cereus, and Collected Poems.

August 11: Alex Haley (1921-1992) was an editor and journalist who wrote The Autobiography of Malcolm X. He became well known for his fictionalized family history, Roots: The Saga of an American Family, which won the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted for a television miniseries. .His book Queen: The Story of An American Family was completed by David Stevens and published in 1993.

August 28: Rita Dove has been poet laureate to both the Library of Congress (1993-1995) and the Commonwealth of Virginia since 2004. She was also Special Consultant in Poetry for the Library of Congress bicentennial (1999-2000). In 1987 she won the Pulitzer Prize for her book Thomas and Beulah. She has published many poetry collections, short stories, essays, a play, and a novel, Through the Ivory Gate.

August 31: Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005) was a poet who was a member of the Umbra Workshop, a New York City group involved with the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. His books include Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry, The Bathers, and Sound Science. He won Poets Foundation awards and the Lucille Medwick Prize.