Amiri Baraka
Born Everett Leroy Jones to a middle-class family in Newark, New Jersey, the son of a postal employee and social worker, Amiri Baraka was educated at Rutgers, Howard, and Columbia universities. His work and his system of beliefs have gone through several distinct phases. In the late 1950s and early 1960s he was active among Beat writers on New York's Lower East Side, writing his own poetry and plays and editing two period magazines, Yugen and Floating Bear.