Author Biographies

LITERATURE BIOGRAPHIES

HENRY KING- Born in 1592 Henry King was the older son of John King, Bishop of London, and his wife Joan Freeman.Henry King was an English poet and bishop, He attended the Lord Williams School in Westminister and the Christ Church in Oxford and earned his bachelor and master degrees in Arts. Henry went on to marry Anne who died later on at the age of 23 . Henry was also close friend with John Donne, and Died on the 30th of September ,1669 in Chichester, The United Kingdom.

GABRIEL OKARA- Gabriel Imomtimi Gbaingbain Okara was a Nigerian poet ans novelist born on April 21,1921 in Bumodi. Okara was the son of an Ijọ chief. He was educated at Government College, Umuahia, and later at Yaba Higher College. He studied journalism at Northwestern University in 1949, and before the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War worked as Information Officer for the Eastern Nigerian Government Service.Gabriel Okara is now 94

TONI CADE BAMBARA-Editor, teacher, writer, cultural and community worker, Toni Cade Bambara was born Miltona Mirkin Cade, on March 25, 1939 to Helen Brent Henderson Cade in New York City. Toni spent her childhood and adolescent years with her mother and brother in New York City and Jersey City, New Jersey. Deeply affected by the Black Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, Toni’s mother encouraged her to write, and even instructed Toni’s teachers about African American history. One classmate remembers that Toni was also outspoken, and smart—she graduated high school six months early.

In 1959, Cade received her B.A. in theater arts/English from Queens College and published her first short story, “Sweet Town.” After a year in Milan, Italy, Cade returned to New York in 1962 to finish a Master’s degree in modern American fiction at New York City College, while working as a social worker, occupational therapist and director of various neighborhood projects.

Bambara began teaching at City College in 1965, directing the Theater of the Black Experience, and advising various student publications. During this same period, she published short stories in Redbook and other magazines. Attaining the post of associate professor of English at Rutgers University in 1969, Cade took on the name Bambara after seeing it inscribed on her great-grandmother’s sketchbook.

In 1970, Bambara edited and published her first book, The Black Woman: An Anthology, in which African American women of different ages and classes voiced issues not addressed by the civil rights and women’s movements. Bambara nurtured and promoted young writers by including college undergraduates as well as famous writers like Audre Lorde in The Black Woman and in a second anthology, Tales and Stories for Black Folks (1971). In October, 1972, Toni Cade Bambara published her first short-story collection called Gorilla, My Love. Between 1973 and 1975, Bambara visited Cuba and Viet Nam and learned about the political effectiveness of women’s organizations in these countries.

Moving to Atlanta with her daughter in 1974, Bambara taught at Spelman College and cultivated emerging writers, by founding the Pamoja Writer’s Collective and hosting potlucks at her home. Bambara’s dedication to the Black community continued to influence her writing during this period, as she balanced themes of social change and community healing in her second collection of short stories, The Sea Birds Are Still Alive (1977), and in her first novel, The Salt Eaters (1980), which received the American Book Award in 1981.

In the early 1980s, Bambara and her daughter again relocated, this time to Philadelphia, where she completed two other novels, If Blessing Comes(1987) and Raymond’s Run (1990), and nine screenplays, including Bombing of Osage and Tar Baby (based on a novel by Toni Morrison). After writing another collection of short stories, Toni Cade Bambara died of colon cancer on December 9, 1995, at the age of 56

adapted from:

http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/toni-cade-bambara/

ROBERT P.T. COFFIN- Robert Peter Tristam Coffin also know as “The Poet”, was a poet , American writer and professor at Wells College. He was born on March 18, 1892 in Brunswick, Maine, USA , and was educated at Bowdoin in 1915, and graduated from Princeton University and Oxford University, with degrees. He regarded poetry as a public function that should speak well of life so that people would find inspiration. Coffin is best known as the author of more than three dozen works of literature, poetry and history, including the book ‘Strange Holiness’, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1936. Robert P.T. Coffin on January 20,1995 at the age of 62 in Brunswick, Maine.

STEWART BROWN- Is an English born lecturer who studied at Nottingham College of Education from , Falmouth School of Art, the University of Sussex , and the University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Stewart Brown has taught at Bayero University, Nigeria, and at the University of the West Indies, at its Jamaica and Barbados campuses.As an artist, in the 1970s he had several solo shows of paintings in Jamaica and the UK, and more recently his work has been exhibited in Birmingham, in Barbados, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and in Guyana. As a poet, he received a Gregory Award in 1976 and has published four collections of poems