Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka is the author of over 40 books of essays, poems, drama, and music history and criticism, a poet icon and revolutionary political activist. His books range from from Selected Poetry of Amiri Baraka/LeRoi Jones (1979), to The Music (1987), a fascinating collection of poems and monographs on Jazz and Blues authored by Baraka and his wife and poet Amina, and his boldly sortied essays, The Essence of Reparations (2003). Baraka is renowned as the founder of the Black Arts Movement in Harlem in the 1960s. He has been the subject of numerous documentary films including Mario Van Peeble’s Poetic License for The Sundance Channel and St. Clair Bourne’s In Motion: Amiri Baraka. His awards and honors include an Obie, the American Academy of Arts & Letters award, the James Weldon Johnson Medal for contributions to the arts, Rockefeller Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts grants, Professor Emeritus at the State university of New York at Stony Brook, and the Poet Laureate of New Jersey.