African-American Writers: A Dictionary

Shari Dorantes Hatch is a professional writer specializing in history, biography, and the social sciences.

Michael R. Strickland is assistant professor of literacy education at New Jersey City University and a Paul Robeson Fellow at the Institute for Arts and Humanities Education.

This very complete and readable dictionary helps to meet that challenge. Spanning the entire history of African American expression, it covers more than 530 individuals, including writers of commercials, hymns, newspaper editorials, and rap songs along with screenplays, novels, autobiographies, essays, and poetry. Publishers, editors, and patrons of the arts are included as well. Entries vary from just a sentence for actor Laurence Fishburne to 10 pages for Richard Wright. A handful of important movements, publications, and genres (e.g., Harlem Renaissance, Negro Digest, Spirituals ) are also treated.

Each author entry begins with the author\rquote s birth name, followed by pseudonyms or alternative names and birth and death dates if available, as well as the genres appropriate to the individual. In addition to biographical facts, the editors have included information about what inspired the authors to compose their works, in the hope that the volume would be \ldblquote a springboard for further investigation or even a source of ideas.\rdblquote Cross-references are in bold type, and each entry ends with abbreviated source references. The book is sprinkled with photographs and concludes with an appendix of writers by genre, a chronology of writers and a chronology of \ldblquote firsts,\rdblquote full bibliographic references, and an index.

Many of these authors have been profiled in other works, including Gale\rquote s Black Writers and Something about the Author. The Oxford Companion to African American Literature (1997) covers more than 400 authors, as well as works, characters, magazines and newspapers, publishers, influences, genres, and other related topics. Libraries holding such titles may choose not to add the ABC-CLIO volume to their reference collections, although the benefit of having information on so many authors in one place cannot be overstated. Recommended for high-school, public, and academic libraries. REVWR
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