Amiri Baraka, born Everett LeRoi Jones in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey, was a poet, writer, teacher, and political activist. He attended Rutgers University and Howard University, spent three years in the U.S. Air Force, and attended Columbia University and the New School for Social Research.
Baraka’s own political stance changed several times, thus dividing his oeuvre into periods: as a member of the avant-garde during the 1950s, Baraka—writing as Leroi Jones—was associated with Beat poets like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac; in the ‘60s, he moved to Harlem and became a Black Nationalist; in the ‘70s, he was involved in third-world liberation movements and identified as a Marxist. Baraka incited controversy throughout his career. He was praised for speaking out against oppression as well as accused of fostering hate. Baraka, like the projectivist poets, believed that a poem’s form should follow the shape determined by the poet’s own breath and intensity of feeling.
Baraka’s first published collection of poems, Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note, appeared in 1961. Baraka was also a writer of music criticism, publishing Blues People: Negro Music in White America in 1963, tracing black music from slavery to contemporary jazz. In 1967, his collection Black Magic was published. Baraka was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts and was recognized for his work through a PEN/Faulkner Award, a Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama, and the Langston Hughes Award from City College of New York.
Information from the Poetry Foundation.