Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on 27 June 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, and died there on 9 February 1906, only thirty-three years later. In that brief life he became one of the most accomplished and consequential American writers of his generation: a poet of extraordinary musical discipline, a novelist and short-story writer, a public reader, a lyricist, and, in many ways, the first African American author to achieve a broad…
“I have never been able to determine whether I am a poet who writes prose or a prose writer who writes poetry.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
Otto Leland Bohanan, born around 1895 in Washington, D.C., and dead in New York City on December 6, 1932, belonged to the first generation of African American artists whose work helped prepare the ground for the Harlem Renaissance. He was a poet, composer, baritone, teacher, and cultivated public intellectual, a figure whose gifts moved easily among literature, music, education, and fraternity life. His surviving rep…
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Nature Poets, Poet-Musicians, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Longing, Wonder
