Authors’ Birthdays: September
This month’s birthdays include an author who published her book after she was 100 years old.
September 3: Annie Elizabeth "Bessie" Delany (1891-1995) was a dentist who became an author after she was 100 years old when she and her sister, Sarah "Sadie" Delany (1889-1999), a former teacher, published the bestseller, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years.
September 4: Richard Wright (1908-1960) was a major African-American writer who published from the late 1930s until the late 1950s. Several works were published posthumously. His most well-known books include Native Son, Black Boy, The Outsider, and Uncle Tom's Children.
September 5: Larry Neal (1937-1981) was a poet, playwright, and essayist who was very active and influential in the Black Arts Movement of the 1970s. He co-edited, with Imiri Baraka, Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing.
September 9: Sonia Sanchez has published more than a dozen books of poetry, many plays, two anthologies (We Be Word Sorcerers: Twenty-five Stories by Black Americans and Three Hundred Sixty Degrees of Blackness Comin' at You), and several children's books.
September 10: Georgia Douglas Johnson (1866-1967) published three collections of poetry during the Harlem Renaissance-The Heart of a Woman, Bronze, and An Autumn Love Cycle-and one in 1962, Share My World
September 13: Alain Locke (1886-1954) was a highly influential writer, philosopher, and educator best known for his cultural activities related to the Harlem Renaissance. He encouraged black artists and writers to seek excellence in their work. His writing covers the spectrum of African-American culture, while his best-known work is the anthology, The New Negro.
September 15: Claude McKay (1889-1984), originally from Jamaica, was an important poet and fiction writer of the Harlem Renaissance. His novels include Home to Harlem, Banjo, and Banana Bottom. (See more on Claude McKay.)
September 16: Henry Louis Gates, Jr. is a professor, author and documentary producer who has won many prizes for his work in African-American literary criticism, preservation of black literary classics, historical writing, and more.
September 16: James Alan McPherson is a fiction writer and essayist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his collections of short stories, Elbow Room.
September 19: Keorapetse Kgositsile is a South African poet/activist who lived in exile in the United States from 1962 until 1975. Jazz and the Pan-African movement have influenced his work. He has published many collections of poetry, including This Way I Salute You.
September 25: bell hooks is a poet, activist, and feminist. Among her many writings, her poetry includes And There We Wept and A Woman's Mourning Song.
