Each month, we highlight birthdays of authors for you to discover through print and digital items as well as online biographies. In the post below, click on the author’s name to find titles by them in our catalog. Read a bit about each author below and find their full biography in the database listed.
Need a TCCL card? Visit www.tulsalibrary.org/application.
Maya Angelou (April 4, 1928): “Maya Angelou was one of the premier U.S. poets of the 20th century. Her status was secured by her recital, at the request of President-elect Bill Clinton, of her poem "On the Pulse of Morning" at his inauguration in January 1993. It was the first time since Jimmy Carter's inauguration in 1977 that a poet had participated in the ceremony. She is a prominent, much-respected role model for many African American artists.”
From her biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Booker T. Washington (April 5, 1856): “Booker T. Washington, founder of Tuskegee Institute, is known for his approach to improving race relations in the South, insisting that African Americans must begin forging their own pathway to equality through work, determination, skills development, and education. For Washington, self-sufficiency was the key attribute that would facilitate legal and social reform. However, his policy of accommodationism advocating collaboration with southern whites, publicized through the Atlanta Compromise speech (1896), has made him a controversial figure in African American history.”
From his biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Barbara Kingsolver (April 8, 1955): “Best-selling author Barbara Kingsolver infuses her writings with a strong sense of family, relationships, and community. Kingsolver draws her characters from middle America--the shop owners, the unemployed, the displaced, the homeless, the mothers and children struggling to survive--and depicts how, by banding together, these seemingly forgotten people can thrive. As a firm believer in human dignity and worth, Kingsolver fills her works with themes of inspiration, love, strength, and endurance. Many critics have applauded her tenderness toward her characters and praise her insight into human nature, political repression, and ecological imperatives.”
From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Beverly Cleary (April 12, 1916): “Beverly Cleary's humorous, realistic portraits of American children have rendered her among the most successful writers for young readers. Books were important to Cleary from an early age, for her mother established the first lending library in the small town of McMinnville, Oregon, where Cleary was born. ‘It was in this dingy room filled with shabby leather-covered chairs and smelling of stale cigar smoke that I made the most magic of discoveries,’ Cleary recalled in Top of the News. ‘There were books for children!’”
From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Nella Larsen (April 13, 1891): “African American novelist Nella Larsen is known for her contributions to African American literature, particularly that associated with the Harlem Renaissance. Larsen wrote about the politically charged subjects of racial identity and white privilege as well as the social roles and expectations for women in the 1920s. She obscured many of the details of her personal life, which may have been a statement about her privacy or the desire to move between both black and white cultures.“
From her biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Rita Williams-Garcia (April 13, 1957): “Classed among such celebrated African American writers as Jacqueline Woodson, Dolores Johnson, and Angela Johnson, Rita Williams-Garcia is known for insightful novels that explore such hard-hitting teen issues as teen pregnancy, rape, genital mutilation, girl-on-girl violence, and child abandonment. In Y.A. novels such as Fast Talk on a Slow Track,No Laughter Here, and Jumped, Williams-Garcia draws on her adolescent experiences coming of age in a New York City neighborhood, as well as on situations she has encountered as a teacher and a dancer. Her Coretta Scott King award-winning novel One Crazy Summer, written for younger readers, is equally informed by such personal experience."
From Gale Literature: Contemporary Authors in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Charlotte Bronte (April 21, 1816): “The English novelist Charlotte Brontë (1816--1855) portrayed the struggle of the individual to maintain his integrity with a dramatic intensity entirely new to English fiction. Her novel Jane Eyre became an English literary classic.”
From Encyclopedia of World Biography Online in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
August Wilson (April 27, 1945): “August Wilson was one of America's premier playwrights and chroniclers of the African-American experience. He has won the Pulitzer Prize in drama for his plays Fences (1987) and The Piano Lesson (1990), as well as many other distinguished awards.”
From his biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Jessie Redmon Fauset (April 27, 1882): “Novelist, journalist, and editor, Jessie Redmon Fauset's work now receives considerable attention from scholars of black literature and of women's literature.”
From her biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Terry Pratchett (April 28, 1948): “Humorous genre fiction, science fiction or fantasy, has generally been regarded even within those fields as somehow inferior to more serious efforts. The implication is that it is more difficult to thrill or scare a reader than to cause laughter. Although most attempts at humor are in fact juvenile or trite, there are a handful of writers like Douglas Adams who bring a definite art to the job, and Terry Pratchett has carved out a niche as the field's cleverest and most consistently entertaining humorist.”
From St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Harper Lee (April 28, 1926): “Harper Lee wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, a searing tale of racial injustice in a small Alabama town in the 1930s. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1961 and became required reading for successive generations of high school students. ‘She showed us the beautiful complexity of our common humanity, and the importance of striving for justice in our own lives, our communities, and our country,’ declared President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama in a statement released by the White House, according to the Washington Post. ‘Lee changed America for the better.’”
From Newsmakers in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
Yusef Komunyakaa (April 29, 1947): “Yusef Komunyakaa has distinguished himself as a prolific and prizewinning poet, having produced 13 books of poetry since 1987. Moreover, Komunyakaa's poetry has been compared to the quality of Ralph Ellison's and James Baldwin's, two of the most revered among male African American writers. Although Komunyakaa's reputation is based on his poetry, he also has written songs and prose performance pieces. His work illustrates reverence for the oral and musical traditions of African American culture. Moreover, his work is also reflective of the African American experience prior to the civil rights era and during the Vietnam War.”
From his biography in the African American Experience database. Find the database HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.
William Shakespeare (April 1564): “English playwright, poet, and actor. Shakespeare is universally recognized as the foremost writer in the English language to date. The thirty-seven plays associated with his name, including the major tragedies Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, and his romances and comedies, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night's Dream among them, have been translated into many languages and have crossed all kinds of cultural divide. His poetry, in particular his intricately woven and fiercely passionate love sonnets, have stirred the senses of reader and critic alike for generations past and will do so for generations to come.”
From Europe, 1450 to 1789: Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World by Eva Griffith in the Biography in Context database. Find Biography in Context HERE, then log in with your last name and TCCL card number to search this author's name and explore the resources about them.