Spotlight On

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) was born in Saint Lucia, an island in the Lesser Antilles in the Caribbean Sea. Walcott received The Nobel Prize for literature in 1992. Walcott, a poet and playwright, won numerous awards during his writing career. His play, Dream on Monkey Mountain (1970), was produced in 1970 by NBC-TV. The play won an OBIE and Walcott started teaching at Boston University where he founded the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre in 1981. The Nobel committee described Walcott’s work as “a poetic oeuvre of great luminosity, sustained by a historical vision, the outcome of a multicultural commitment”. He won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2004.

Percival Everett, the gifted novelist, was born in 1956 in Georgia, his father was a sergeant in the US army. Everett grew up in South Carolina and earned a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from the University of Miami. He studied a broad variety of topics including biochemistry and mathematical logic. In 1982, he earned a master’s degree in fiction from Brown University and published his first book while in graduate school. Everett published James last year, a reimagining of Huck Finn. The novel won the 2024 Kirkus Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. His terrific novel Erasure was made into an award winning movie, American Fiction.

Born in 1961, award winning author and journalist, Isabel Wilkerson, was born in Washington D.C. her family having left Virginia during the Great Migration. Her father, Oscar Lawton Wilkerson, was one of the Tuskegee Airmen during World War II and became a bridge engineer after the war. Wilkerson won many journalism awards and in 2010 after fifteen years of research and writing, she published the award winning book The Warmth of Other Suns, about The Great Migration. Her book, Caste was called a “powerful and extraordinarily timely social history,” by Publishers Weekly.

Edwidge Danticat was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti in 1969. Her first novel, Breath, Eyes, Memory, was a critical and commercial success when it was published in 1994. Danticat was educated in Haiti in French but spoke French-Creole at home. She finished high school in New York and studied literature at Barnard and has an MFA in writing from Brown University. Edwidge Danticat is a professor at Columbia University. Her writing illuminates Haitian life and the immigrant experience in general.

Colson Whitehead was born in Manhattan in 1969. His parents were successful entrepreneurs and Whitehead attended private schools, graduating from Harvard College in 1991, majoring in English and comparative literature. Whitehead returned to New York City and started working at The Village Voice. He published his first novel in 1999. John Updike reviewed The Intuitionist in The New Yorker and called Whitehead “ambitious”, “scintillating”, and “strikingly original”, adding: “The young African-American writer to watch may well be a thirty-one-year-old Harvard graduate with the vivid name of Colson Whitehead.” Colson Whitehead has won many awards, including The Pulitizer Prize, twice. Subsequent novels include The Nickel Boys, just made into a feature film and nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture. Filmmaker Barry Jenkins named it one of his favorite films of 2024, saying “This is medium-defining work — aesthetically, spiritually — a rich and overwhelming cinema where the camera is always curious and what it finds is always arresting. In a time where there are more ways to make a film than ever, (filmmaker) RaMell Ross has given us a new way of seeing.”

Zadie Smith, born Sadie Smith in north London in 1975, is a novelist, essayist and critic. Smith is currently a Professor at NYU. Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, was a critical and commercial success. While at Kings College, Cambridge Smith auditioned unsuccessfully for the famous Cambridge Footlight, though Smith is an accomplished dancer and Jazz singer. She is also a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.

In 2010, The Guardian newspaper asked Smith for her “10 rules for writing fiction”. Among them she declared: “Tell the truth through whichever veil comes to hand – but tell it. Resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.”

One of her students has remarked that Zadie Smith is unique in that despite being a woman of African descent and writing about the immigrant experience— including wearing a headwrap, Smith has proven her extensive knowledge of the western canon and is accepted by white male intellectuals. No small feat.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, an American author, journalist and activist, was born in Baltimore in 1975. Coates was national correspondent at The Atlantic, he wrote articles and a Blog. The topics covered by the blog included politics, history, race, culture, sports, and music. Coates wrote several books of non-fiction and authored a series for Marvel Comics called Black Panther. His first novel, The Water Dancer, was published in 2019.

As a child, naughtiness resulted in Coates having to sit alone and write essays. Coates received a writing fellowship in France and attended Middlebury College’s language intensive to learn French before he left. Coates studied writing at MIT, taught at the CUNY School of Journalism, worked as a writer in residence at NYU and now is the chair of the English Department at Howard University, his alma mater.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie was born in Nigeria in 1977 to parents of Igbo (the oldest tribe in Nigeria) origin. Adichie studied medicine at the University of Nigeria but left Africa at the age of nineteen. The official language in Nigeria is English and Adichie studied writing at Johns Hopkins and African Studies at Yale University and received master’s degrees at both.

Adichie read books in English as a child, and they were English books. Enid Blyton was a favorite and in Adichie’s early writings her characters were white children with blue eyes and at the age of ten she began reading African writers, including her Biafran fathers’ stories. Adichie’s fourth novel, Americanah, published in 2013, it concerns the African diaspora and issues of identity and the notion of “a shared Black consciousness.” Astonishingly, the Transatlantic Slave Trade, was not taught in many African countries, and the main characters in Americanah, one in the United States and one in England, experience a loss of identity living outside Africa.

“Adichie often separates characters into social classes to illustrate social ambiguities and traditional hierarchies. By using narratives from characters of different segments of society, as she reiterates in her TED talk, “The Danger of a Single Story”, she conveys the message that there is no single truth about the past. Adichie is encouraging her readers to recognize their own responsibility to one another, and the injustice that exists in the world.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald

THE novel of the Jazz Age and Fitzgerald’s masterpiece.

Ernest Hemingway

Before The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway was already the master of modern prose. This is his first collection of short stories.

Virginia Woolf

Often hailed as her greatest work of fiction, this story of one day in a woman’s life will grab you from the first sentence.

P.G. Wodehouse

No one said great writing had to be serious, and Wodehouse proved it by creating two of the great comic characters of the 20th Century.

Chris Barton

(Picture book – recommended for grades K-2+)

Jacqueline Woodson

(Middle grade – recommended for grades 4-7)

Vanessa Newton

(Picture book – recommended for grades K-2+)

Kekla Magoon

(Young adult – recommended for grades 9-12+)