William Shakespeare was an English playwright, poet, and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's…
Gustave Flaubert was a French novelist. He has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country and abroad. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flaubert, rea…
In 1868, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (pronounced 'doo-boyz') was born in Massachusetts. He attended Fisk College in Nashville, then earned his BA in 1890 and his MS in 1891 from Harvard. Du Bois …
William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and dramatist, and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years Yea…
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cull…
Tiya Miles is from Ohio, "the heart of it all," though now she spends summers in her husband's native Montana. She is the author of All That She Carried (which won a National Book Award for nonfiction…
Houston A. Baker is Distinguished University Professor and a professor of English at Vanderbilt University. He has been awarded fellowships by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the Nat…
Katherine McKittrick is a professor in Gender Studies at Queen’s University. She is an academic and writer whose work focuses on black studies, cultural geography, anti-colonial and diaspora studies, …
Kahlil Gibran (Arabic: جبران خليل جبران) was a Lebanese-American artist, poet, and writer. Born in the town of Bsharri in modern-day Lebanon (then part of Ottoman Mount Lebanon), as a young man he…