Born in Flint, Michigan and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas, E. Lynn Harris graduated from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in 1977, earning a degree in journalism with honors. After college, Harris sold computers for IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and AT&T for 13 years before quitting his job to write his first novel. The resulting book, Invisible Life, was self-published in 1992 and sold mostly at beauty salons and black-owned bookstores. After being published in trade paperback by Anchor Books, Invisible Life became the #1 book on the Blackboard Bestseller List of African-American Titles and spent a total of 25 consecutive months on the list. Harris was an openly gay African American… and was best known for his depictions of African American men on the down low or in the closet. He won numerous awards for his work including two Novel of the Year Prizes by the Blackboard African-American Bestsellers, Inc. for Just As I Am and Any Way the Wind Blows, the James Baldwin Award for Literary Excellence for If This World Were Mine, and the Lambda Literary Award for the anthology Freedom in This Village. His other books include And This Too Shall Pass; Abide with Me; Not a Day Goes By; A Love of My Own; I Say a Little Prayer; What Becomes of the Brokenhearted; Just Too Good to Be True, and Basketball Jones. His work also appeared in American Visions, Essence, Washington Post Sunday Magazine, Sports Illustrated and the award-winning anthology Brotherman: The Odyssey of Black Men in America. He died on July 23, 2009 at the age of 54.
Gerald Early is Professor of English, African and African American Studies, and American Cultural Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.
Walter Dean Myers was born on August 12, 1937 in Martinsberg, West Virginia. When he was three years old, his mother died and his father sent him to live with Herbert and Florence Dean in Harlem, New York. He began writing stories while in his teens. He dropped out of high school and enlisted in the Army at the age of 17. After completing his army service, he took a construction job and continued to write. He entered and won a 1969 contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children, which led to the publication of his first book, Where Does the Day Go? During his lifetime, he wrote more than 100 fiction and nonfiction books for children and young adults. His works include… Fallen Angels, Bad Boy, Darius and Twig, Scorpions, Lockdown, Sunrise Over Fallujah, Invasion, Juba!, and On a Clear Day. He also collaborated with his son Christopher, an artist, on a number of picture books for young readers including We Are America: A Tribute from the Heart and Harlem, which received a Caldecott Honor Award, as well as the teen novel Autobiography of My Dead Brother. He was the winner of the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for Monster, the first recipient of the Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and a recipient of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in writing for young adults. He also won the Coretta Scott King Award for African American authors five times. He died on July 1, 2014, following a brief illness, at the age of 76.
Junot D�az was born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and was raised in New Jersey. His fiction has appeared in numerous publications including The New Yorker, The Paris Review, African Voices, and Best American Short Stories. He wrote the story collection Drown and the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won the John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize. He is a professor of creative writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.