Amiri Baraka

Poet, playwright, critic, and novelist Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones) was best known to the jazz community for his two books, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, published in 1964, and Black Music in 1967, both as LeRoi Jones. Long before this, however, Baraka was identified with the New York School of poets and the Beats (he was included in Donald Allen's seminal anthology The New American Poetry). His first book of poetry, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, was published in 1961. With Diane Di Prima he founded and edited the legendary Floating Bear new...