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Quincy Jones cannot be pigeonholed. In his 50-year music career, Jones has worn the hats of composer, record producer, artist, arranger, conductor, instrumentalist and record company executive. His musical career…

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. was a managing director of Lazard Frères & Co. LLC in New York. Before his work at Lazard, he served as a senior executive partner with…

Although he just published his second novel, Colson Whitehead is already a highly decorated author. His latest work, John Henry Days, received several distinguished literary awards, including the 2002 Young…

Jay Wright’s life and career is as rich and diverse as his acclaimed writing. Known best for his books of poetry, Wright has also authored plays and essays. His work…

Stephen L. Carter has helped shape the national debate on issues ranging from the role of religion in American politics and culture to the impact of integrity and civility in…

Adrienne Kennedy has been a force in American theatre since the early 1960s, influencing generations of playwrights with her hauntingly fragmentary lyrical dramas. Exploring the violence racism visits upon people’s…

Power, a former journalist for U.S. News and World Report and the Economist and now the executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights, offers an uncompromising and disturbing…

Reetika Vazirani is the author of White Elephants (Beacon, 1996) selected by Marilyn Hacker for a Barnard New Women Poets Prize. She was educated at Wellesley College and the University…

Eminent historian Berlin revisits and extends by a century the territory of his honored and groundbreaking Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in America (1998), incorporating the…

In a crabbed, powerful follow-up to his National Book Award-nominated short story collection (Lost in the City), Jones explores an oft-neglected chapter of American history, the world of blacks who…

Politicians rail about welfare queens, crack babies and deadbeat dads, but what do they know about the real struggle it takes to survive being poor? Journalist LeBlanc spent some 10…

Derek Walcott, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in St. Lucia, Windward Islands, the West Indies, and has maintained a permanent residence in Trinidad for more…

In her third novel, The Dew Breaker, the prolific Edwidge Danticat spins a series of related stories around a shadowy central figure, a Haitian immigrant to the U.S. who reveals…

A. Van Jordan combines the tragic poignancy of the blues with the cinematic sweep of a documentary in his deeply humane and highly imaginative second book, M·A·C·N·O·L·I·A, which focuses on…

Johnson rose from poverty in Galveston, Texas, to become the first black heavyweight-boxing champion only to end up ruined by his affairs with white women, which landed him in prison…

August Wilson is the author of Gem of the Ocean, Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, The Piano Lesson, Seven Guitars, Fences, Two Trains Running, Jitney, King…

Novelist William Demby, born on Christmas Day 1922 in Pittsburgh, PA, grew up in Clarksburg, WV. He attended West Virginia State College for a time, with World War II interrupting…

Jill Lepore is Professor of History at Harvard University and chair of the History and Literature Program. A contributor to The New Yorker, Lepore has also written for The New…

Zadie Smith was born in northwest London and continues to live in the area. Her first novel, White Teeth, was published in 2000 and won the Guardian First Book Award,…

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born on 15 September 1977 in Enugu, Nigeria, the fifth of six children to Igbo parents, Grace Ifeoma and James Nwoye Adichie. While the family’s ancestral…