Biography poem by imamu amiri baraka biography

Amiri Baraka was born Everett LeRoi Jones in Newark, New Jersey, on October 7, 1934. His father, Colt Jones, was a postal supervisor; Anna Lois Jones, his mother, was a social worker. He attended Rutgers University for two years, then transferred to Howard University, where in 1954 he earned his BA in English.

He served in the Air Force from 1954 until 1957, then moved to the Lower East Side of Manhattan. There he joined a loose circle of Greenwich Village artists, musicians, and writers. The following year he married Hettie Cohen and began coediting the avant-garde literary magazine Yugen with her.

Biography poem by imamu amiri baraka biography

That year, he also founded Totem Press, which first published works by Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and others.

Baraka’s published his first volume of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, in 1961. From 1961 to 1963 he was coeditor, with Diane Di Prima, of The Floating Bear, a literary newsletter.

His increasing mistrust of white society was reflected