Amiri Baraka Breaking News

Amiri Baraka Breaking News

Amiri Baraka, formerly known as LeRoi Jones, is a dramatist, novelist and poet. He is one of the most respected and widely published African-American writers. He died on this Thursday. He was 79. He co-founded the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s.

       Amiri Baraka was born in 1934, in Newark, New Jersey, USA. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his B.A. in English. He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers.

“The Essence of Reparations” is his first published collection of essays in book form radically exploring what is sure to become a twenty-first century watershed movement of Black peoples to the interrelated issues of racism, national oppression, colonialism, neo-colonialism, self-determination and national and human liberation, which he has long been addressing creatively and critically. It has been said that Amiri Baraka is committed to social justice like no other American writer. He has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

The literary world respects the playwright and poet, Amiri Baraka as one of the revolutionary provocateurs of African-American poetry. He is counted among the few influential political activists who have spent most of their life time fighting for the rights of African-Americans.

In 2002, Amiri Baraka faced criticism of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America," which led to the removal of his position as state poet laureate of New Jersey.

reference

http://www.npr.org/2014/01/09/261101520/amiri-baraka-poet-and-co-founder-of-black-arts-movement-dies-at-79

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiri_Baraka