Authors' Birthdays: March

Posted by Sharyn Skeeter Mar 2, 2007

March 1: Ralph Ellison (1914-1994) received international recognition with the publication of his novel Invisible Man (1952). He was honored with numerous awards including the American Medal of Freedom, National Medal of Arts, National Book Award Gold Medal, National Newspaper Publishers’ Russwurm Award and, in France,Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Lettres. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He also published essays and his novel, Juneteenth, was published posthumously.

March 5: Charles H. Fuller, Jr. is a playwright from Philadelphia, Penn. who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1982 for A Soldier's Play, which was made into the movie, A Soldier's Story, in 1984. He was co-founder and co-director of Philadelphia’s Afro-American Arts Theatre.

March 12: Virginia Hamilton (1936-2002) was author of more than 30 children’s books. She won many awards including the National Book Award, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award, and the Hans Christian Andersen Medal. Her M.C. Higgins, the Great (1971) won the John Newbery Medal.

March 15: Ben Okri is a Nigerian-born novelist, essayist and poet. His novel The Famished Road won the Booker McConnell Prize for Fiction. His other works include Songs of Enchantment, Astonishing the Gods, A Way of Being Free, and several others.

March 18: Michael S. Harper, the first poet laureate of Rhode Island (1988-1993), has published more than 10 poetry collections. His first, Images of Kin (1977), won the Melville-Cane Award and was nominated for the National Book Award. Harper is a professor at Brown University.

March 22: Houston A. Baker, Jr. is an outspoken literary critic. His books include Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature and his upcoming I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South.

March 23: Ama Ata Aidoo is a Ghanaian playwright and fiction writer who also writes poetry and children’s books. Her works include Anowa, No Sweetness Here, Someone Talking to Sometime, and others. She won the Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book in 1992.

March 25: Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)—fiction writer, essayist, and filmmaker—edited an anthologies, The Black Woman and Tales and Stories for Black Folks. She published collections of short stories, Gorilla, My Love and The Sea Birds Are Still Alive. Her novels include The Salt Eaters and Those Bones Are Not My Child. She won the Best Documentary Academy Award for The Bombing of Osage Avenue.