About this item
Find out how a young boy from the Midwest became one of the most important writers and activists of the Harlem Renaissance in this addition to the #1 New York Times bestselling series!. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and was raised by his grandmother, who told him many stories of the Black American experience and taught him to be proud of his race from a young age. With her guidance, Langston went on to become a talented writer in high school, creating dramatic plays, poetry, and articles for the school paper. His career as a writer would continue to blossom. Langston pioneered Jazz Poetry and published nearly twenty poetry books during his lifetime as well as novels, books for children, nonfiction books, and plays. He was an activist and a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance period, alongside Zora Neale Hurston and Countee Cullen.
About the Author
Billy Merrell is the author of Talking in the Dark, a poetry memoir published when he was twenty-one, and is the co-editor (with David Levithan) of The Full Spectrum: A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Other Identities, which received a Lambda Literary Award. His novel-in-poems Vanilla is forthcoming from Scholastic Press in 2017.
Merrell is also a contributor to the New York Times-bestselling series Spirit Animals, and has published fiction, poetry, and translations in various journals and anthologies. Born in 1982, he grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, and received his MFA in Poetry from Columbia University. He now lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his husband, author Nico Medina.
