Praise Day for David Henderson

David Henderson

David Henderson poet, biographer, educator, songwriter, and a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop, was born in 1942 in Harlem, New York City, New York, and was raised in Harlem and the Bronx. Henderson attended Bronx Community College, Hunter College, and The New School. His first poem was published in 1960 in the weekly African-American newspaper The Black American. In 1963 Henderson co-founded Umbra, both a literary collective and literary magazine with other Black writers and artists in New York’s Lower East Side. Henderson began as co-editor of the journal, and later became the general editor. Henderson’s first collection of poetry, Felix of the Silent Forest, was published in 1967 by Poets Press run by Diane di Prima under the Kriya Press imprint, with an introduction by Amiri Baraka. Baraka wrote, “David Henderson’s poetry is the world echo, with the strength and if you are conscious, beauty of the place tone … These are local epics with the breadth that the emotional consciousness of a culture can make.”

Henderson’s other books include Neo-California (North Atlantic Books, 1998) and De Mayor of Harlem (E. P. Dutton, 1970). Henderson later wrote the biography of Jimi Hendrix, ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Atria Books, 2009). 

David’s relationships to working artists have spanned the gamut from writers and musicians, to actors, filmmakers, dancers, visual artists, and everyone else involved in the making and production of different forms of art. His work as an educator and activist—importantly during the struggle for Open Admissions at City College, CUNY, in the Harlem he grew up in—has left a mark on generations of students, readers, and listeners. And his dedication to the poem itself has served as an example to so many of us.