African-American

• William Christopher Handy. Blues: An Anthology: Complete Words and Music of 53 Great Songs
• --. Book of Negro Spirituals
• --. Father of the Blues: An Autobiography. Ed. Arna Bontemps New York; Macmillan, 1941.
• --. Unsung Americans Sing
• --. Negro Authors and Composers of the United States

James A. Bland, perhaps the greatest African-American folksong writer, was born in 1854 in Flushing, New York. His father, who received a law degree from Howard University, was the first African American appointed examiner to the United States Patent Office.

Lucille Bogan, (nee Armstrong) was born in Amory, Mississippi, on April 1, 1897 and grew up in Birmingham, Alabama. She married Nazareth Bogan, with whom she had two children. Bogan, who also used the pseudonym Bessie Jackson, was a blues writer and performer, known for her explicit lyrics, which covered topics such as sex, prostitution and alcoholism.

• Feinstein, Elaine. Bessie Smith. New York, NY: Viking, 1985. ML420 .S667 F44 1985 University of Toronto Music Library.

• McClaurin-Allen, Irma. "Audre Lorde". Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Trudier Harris, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Thadious M. Davis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Gale Group, 1985. pp. 217-222.

Claude McKay, born in Jamaica on September 15, 1889, came to America in 1912, the year his two books of Jamaican dialect verse came out, Songs of Jamaica and Constab Ballads.

Born in Dayton, Ohio, and raised by his mother, Paul Dunbar stood out as the only black student in Central High School, the class poet, the editor of the school newspaper, and the president of its literary club, the Philomathean Society.