Poet

Author & Poet

b. September 15, 1889
d. May 22, 1948

“If a man is not faithful to his own individuality, he cannot be loyal to anything.”

Claude McKay was a prominent bisexual Jamaican poet and author who earned international renown during the Harlem Renaissance — an awakening of African-American arts and culture in the 1920s and ’30s. McKay’s writing, which illuminated the Black experience, made a historic impact on the literary world.

Festus Claudius “Claude” McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889 to a family of “peasant” farmers. Educated by his brother, a schoolteacher, and an English family friend who was well-versed in British literature and European philosophy, McKay used his formative experiences as inspiration for his writing and use of Jamaican dialect.

At age 17, McKay moved to Kingston, Jamaica, to earn money as a constable while he worked on his poetry. He left the job soon after, having experienced constant racism in the predominantly white capital city.

McKay returned to his hometown, then moved to London in 1912, where he published his first poetry collections, “Songs of Jamaica” and “Constab Ballads.” The works stood in stark contrast, as “Songs” romanticized Jamaican peasant life, while “Constab” painted a dark portrait of the racism and inequities faced by Black Jamaicans. McKay attended Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, then transferred to Kansas State University. He moved to Harlem, New York, in 1914.

In 1925 “The New Negro,” an anthology edited by Alain Locke, showcased McKay’s writing alongside other gifted Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance. McKay published his first book, “Home to Harlem” three years later. Largely a romantic novel, it also portrayed working-class struggles and McKay’s perspective on life as a Black man in America.

During the 1920s, communist ideology captivated McKay, and he traveled to Russia and France. In France he met two other notable writers, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sinclair Lewis. In 1933 he wrote “Romance in Marseille,” the fictional account of an enslaved man who, after receiving reparations, moves to Marseille, France, to live in a society that views homosexuality the same as heterosexuality. 

Considered his most controversial prose, the novel was nearly lost to history. McKay’s editors deemed it too shocking to release. Penguin Classics finally published it, seven decades after McKay’s death.

McKay returned to Harlem in 1934. He had grown critical of communism and wrote of his disillusionment. He completed “Amiable With Big Teeth: A Novel of the Love Affair Between the Communists and the Poor Black Sheep of Harlem” in 1941, but the book remained unpublished until 2017.

Although McKay never came out publicly, he had relationships with both men and women and found community in New York’s LGBT circles. He died of a heart attack at age 58.

Author & Activist

b. July 19, 1875
d. September 18, 1935

“Unwittingly, you’ve made me dream
Of violets, and my soul’s forgotten gleam”

Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a racially-mixed bisexual poet and author whose career spanned multiple literary genres and culminated during the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a lifelong educator and activist who fought for women’s suffrage and equality for Black Americans.

Dunbar-Nelson (née Alice Ruth Moore) was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, 10 years after her enslaved mother gained freedom. Her father, who was rumored to have been a white merchant, left when she was young.

An exceptional student, Dunbar-Nelson graduated from high school at age 14. She attended Straight College (now Dillard University) and received her teaching certificate in 1892. She later attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania.

Initially, Dunbar-Nelson taught in the Louisiana public school system and worked on her writing. In 1895 she published her first book, a collection of stories and poems titled “Violets and Other Tales.” Soon after, she moved to Boston to pursue a literary career. Her work for the Boston Monthly Review captured the heart of a fellow writer, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and they began a two-year correspondence.

During this period, Dunbar-Nelson relocated to Harlem where she cofounded and taught at the White Rose Mission, a “home for Black girls and women.” In 1898 she married Paul Dunbar in New York, and they settled in Washington, D.C.

In 1899 her second book, “The Goodness of St. Rocque and Others,” about Creole life, launched Dunbar-Nelson’s career-long exploration and critique of American culture and racial oppression. She wrote novels, stories, essays, poems, and reviews and kept a diary.

Dunbar-Nelson’s husband physically and emotional abused her. She divorced him in 1902 and moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she taught at various high schools and colleges. She created the Wilmington Advocate, a newspaper promoting racial uplift. She quietly married and divorced a second time and explored relationships with women, including Edwina Kruse, a high school principal, and Fay Jackson Robinson, a journalist and activist.

In 1916 Dunbar-Nelson married the journalist Robert J. Nelson. His activism further ignited her own. Among other pursuits, she served on the Delaware Republican Committee and championed civil rights and women’s suffrage.

During the Harlem Renaissance — the golden age of African-American art and expression in 1920s and ’30s — Dunbar-Nelson lectured and wrote prolifically. Her work inspired influential writers of the era.

Dunbar-Nelson died from a heart condition. Fifty years later, W.W. Norton & Co. published her journal, “Give Us Each Day.” It is one of only two African-American women’s journals published in the 20th century.

Poet

b. February 21, 1907
d. September 29, 1973

“If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.”

Wystan Hugh (W.H.) Auden was a Pulitzer Prize-winning British-born poet who became an American citizen at age 39. Inspired by Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and T. S. Eliot, he is considered one of the greatest poets of the 20th century.

Auden spent his childhood in Birmingham, England. His mother was a devout Anglican. His father was a renowned physician and academic. Auden’s poetry reflects both his mother’s Christian ideals and his father’s interest in folklore and mythology.

After receiving a scholarship to Oxford University, Auden studied science and engineering before switching to English. He developed a close friendship with Christopher Isherwood, a childhood acquaintance and fellow Oxford student. Auden later moved to Berlin with Isherwood, where they frequented a local gay bar and experienced the city’s “decadent homosexual subculture.”

In 1930 Faber & Faber published “Poems,” Auden’s first collection. He spent the next five years teaching English in private schools.

In 1935 Auden married Erika Mann, a lesbian writer and actress and the daughter of the novelist Thomas Mann. A marriage of convenience, the union helped Mann, who was a German Jew, obtain a British passport to escape the Nazis. The couple fled to Britain, where Auden worked as a freelance writer. He began traveling the world and writing about his experiences in Germany, Iceland and China.

Auden quickly earned recognition for his exceptional wit, fluency in virtually all forms of verse, and unique commentary on morals, love and politics. In 1937, motivated by leftist ideology, he traveled to Spain and participated the Spanish Civil War. He published his activist poem, “Spain 1937,” to raise money for Spanish medical aid.

In 1939 Auden and Isherwood moved to New York, where Auden met his lifelong love, Chester Kallman, and they began a relationship. Auden wanted monogamy with the aspiring young poet, but Kallman would not commit. Heartbroken, Auden eventually accepted it, telling Kallman, “We’re a funny pair, you and I.”

From 1942 to 1945, Auden taught at Swarthmore College. In 1946 he acquired U.S. citizenship. He and Kallman spent their summers together in Europe. Auden won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for “The Age of Anxiety” in 1948. He received the National Book Award for Poetry for “The Shield of Achilles” in 1956 and began lecturing at Oxford University as a professor of poetry.

Auden died unexpectedly in Vienna, Austria, in 1973. The attacks of 9/11 revived his poem, “September 1, 1939,” about the outbreak of World War II. It became one of Auden’s best-known works, even though he had grown to despise it during his lifetime.

Seventh Century B.C. Poet

b. 630 B.C.
d. 570 B.C.

“You who judge me, for me you are nothing.” 

Sappho was a lone female voice among the great ancient Greek lyric poets. She flourished in an age when women were rarely afforded a formal education, a place outside the home or a standing among men.

Born to aristocratic parents, Sappho lived most of her life in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesbos. She had at least two brothers, Larichus and Charaxus. One of her poems describes a daughter, Cleis. Experts have long debated the facts of her personal life, including her sexuality and her marriage to Ceryclas, a wealthy man from the island of Andros.

In the third century B.C., Alexandrian scholars collected Sappho’s poetry into nine books. Today, only fragments of various lengths remain. Just two of her complete poems have survived.

In ancient Greece, “lyric” poetry was meant to be sung, accompanied by a harp-like instrument known as a lyre. Sappho would have been a musician as well as a poet. Her sensual songs largely conveyed themes of eroticism, passion and longing—explicitly toward women. Examples from her canon include a hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual love and beauty, calling upon her to join the poet as a “comrade in arms.” In Fragment 31, Sappho speaks of her yearning for a woman in the company of a man: “He seems to me an equal of the gods—whoever gets to sit across from you and listen to the sound of your sweet speech so close to him.”

Sappho became a symbol of female same-sex ardor. The word “sapphic,” referring to the unique style of four-line stanzas she devised, comes from her name, and “lesbian” derives from her home on Lesbos.

Throughout history, Sappho’s lyrics sparked praise and controversy. Ancient critics celebrated her work and poets imitated it. The Greeks referred to Homer as “the poet” and Sappho as “the Poetess.” Plato, who generally disapproved of poetry, called her the “tenth Muse.” She was honored on coins and in public statuary. Christian censors through various ages in Alexandria, Rome and Constantinople rejected her work. In the first millennium A.D., Saint Gregory of Nazianzus and Pope Gregory VII ordered her verses burned. Victorian moralists and literary editors condemned her.

Sappho’s impact is clear: she altered existing ideas about poetry, which had previously been ceremonial, structured and impersonal. She turned it into an art form, creating unique meter and intimate, descriptive language directed toward female love interests and friends. Scholars recognize Sappho as one of the great poets of world literature.

Pulitzer-Winning Poet

b. September 10, 1935
d. January 17, 2019

"I want to say: all my life / I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms."

Mary Oliver was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet who wrote with reverence and poignancy about the natural world. She published 15 collections of poetry during her more than 50-year career.

Oliver was born and raised in Maple Heights, Ohio, outside of Cleveland. She was sexually abused as a small child. In her early teens, she wrote her first poems in the neighboring woods, where she sought refuge from a difficult homelife.

Oliver attended Ohio State University and Vassar College, but never completed her degree. Profoundly inspired by the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she lived for a time during the 1950s in Millay’s home, helping the poet’s sister organize papers after Millay’s death. There, Oliver met her life partner, Molly Malone Cook, a photographer.

In the 1960s Oliver moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, to be with Cook, where the couple remained for more than 40 years. Though Oliver was open about her sexuality, she fiercely protected her privacy.

In 1963 Oliver published her first collection, “No Voyage and Other Poems.” Known for the accessibility of her writing, she intentionally avoided “fancy” words. Her blank verse is rich with earthy themes stemming from her observations of nature and the excesses of modern civilization. Many of her poems are based on memories of Ohio and Provincetown.

Oliver earned prestigious fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her list of honors includes an American Academy of Arts & Letters Award and the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize. In 1984 Oliver won a Pulitzer Prize for “American Primitive,” her fifth collection of poetry. In 1990 her collection “House of Light” won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award. In 1992 her “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award.

Oliver held the Catharine Osgood Foster Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College in Vermont. She was a Poet in Residence at Bucknell University and the Margaret Banister Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College. In 2003 Harvard University made her an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa. Dartmouth conferred her with an honorary doctorate in 2007.

Oliver died in Florida of lymphoma. She was 83. The New York Times published her obituary.

Poet & Activist

b. September 1946
d. July 22, 2011

“I don't practice [Islam]. But I compensate by helping other people, by doing my activism ..." 

Ifti Nasim was a gay Pakistani-American poet whose unique LGBT-themed collections, written in Urdu, were published internationally. He helped establish Sangat Chicago, an organization supporting South-Asian LGBT youth.

Nasim was born in Faisalabad, Pakistan. He was the middle child in a large, traditional Islamic family. Throughout his teens, Nasim experienced bullying, ostracization and loneliness as a gay youth. A passionate poet and an activist who opposed Pakistan’s martial law, Nassim was once shot in the leg during a protest.

Inspired by a Life magazine article touting America’s acceptance of gays, Nassim emigrated to the United States at the age of 21. He enrolled at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where he continued his poetry. He spent most of his life in Chicago, Illinois, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen. Some of his siblings joined him in America.

In 1986, at the age of 40, Nasim helped found Sangat Chicago, an advocacy organization and support group for young people of South Asian origin. Sangat’s participants found solace connecting with one another and sharing experiences, particularly of being LGBT Muslims. Nasim also regularly hosted a weekly radio show and contributed to an American Pakistani newspaper.

Nasim wrote poems in English as well as in Urdu and Punjabi, two of the languages spoken in Pakistan. He published three books of poems in Urdu, which conveyed novel themes of the plight of LGBT people in Muslim and third-world countries. His most popular collection, "Narman" (1994), which translates to "hermaphrodite," became the first published articulation of gay themes in Urdu and sparked a movement of "honest" poetry. "Narman" was distributed in the United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden and Germany, and underground in India and Pakistan. His other two books of poetry, "Myrmecophile" (2000) and "Abdoz" (2005), explored gay love, longing and the pressures of heteronormativity.

In 1993 Nasim became the first poet from a developing nation to read his work at Chicago’s Harold Washington Library Center. The following year, Chicago’s South Asian Family Services awarded him the Rabindranath Tagore Award for his poetry. In 1996 he was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame.

Nasim died in Chicago of a sudden heart attack at the age of 64. The Chicago Tribune published his obituary.

Poet

b. December 10, 1830
d. May 15, 1886

“If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain.”

Emily Dickinson was a reclusive American poet whose stylistic ingenuity challenged conventions and profoundly influenced poetry in the 20^th century. Unrecognized in her own time, she has been celebrated since as one of America’s greatest, most original voices.

Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massachusetts, into a prominent, conservative Protestant family. Her grandfather helped found Amherst College. Her father, a lawyer, served one term in the U.S. Congress. Dickinson attended Amherst Academy, where she excelled in the sciences, Latin and composition.

At age 15, Dickinson pursued higher education at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary. She departed a year later. Against her upbringing and the religious norms of the day, Dickinson never joined a church denomination. Her feelings about religion were influenced by transcendentalism and the poetry of one of its central figures, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Dickinson lived with her sister, Lavinia, on the family homestead. In her early 20s, Dickinson began to restrict her social activity, staying home for communal events and cultivating intense relationships with a small number of correspondents. She and Lavinia cared for their ailing mother for years until her death, after which, Dickinson further withdrew.

By the late 1860s, Dickinson rarely left her home. She became a prolific poet. Over seven years, she created 40 booklets containing roughly 800 poems on themes such as nature, love, death and spirit, including the favorites “A Bird came down the Walk,” “If you were coming in the Fall,” “Because I could not stop for Death” and “‘Hope’ is the thing with Feathers.”

Dickinson expressed ambivalence toward marriage. She maintained one of her strongest relationships with her sister-in-law, Susan Gilbert. Many scholars interpret the relationship as a romantic one. Dickinson sent Gilbert more than 270 letters enclosing her poems.

Very few of Dickinson’s poems were published during her lifetime. Those that were, were altered to conform with literary conventions of the day. After Dickinson died, Lavinia discovered hundreds of her sister’s poems. In 1890 the first volume of those works was published. It wasn't until 1950 that her work in its original, intended form—complete with random capitalization, imaginative word usage and other intentional quirks—reached the public.

Dickinson’s poignant, compressed verse and haunting personal voice have long established her as one of the most important figures in American literature.

Novelist

b. September 11, 1948

“No one of us should feel we can leave someone behind in the struggle for liberation.”

Jewelle Gomez is an author and activist whose writing centers on the experiences of LGBTQ women of color. Her books include the double Lambda Award-winning novel “The Gilda Stories.” Gomez was a founding member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD).

Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Gomez was raised by her great-grandmother, a woman of African and Native American descent. Gomez attended Northeastern University on a full scholarship. As one of the university’s few black students, she began her lifetime of activism participating in protests over campus inequality. She received a Ford Foundation Fellowship to study at Columbia University School of Journalism and worked as a production assistant on “Say Brother,” one of the first black weekly television shows in the United States.

Gomez’s feminist and intersectional activism shapes her creative voice. After several of her poetry collections were published, the first of her many novels, “The Gilda Stories,” was released in 1991. The story, which spans 200 years in the life of Gilda, a vampire who escapes slavery, reframes traditional vampire mythology from a black lesbian feminist perspective. After winning the Lambda Award, Gomez adapted the book into a theatrical production, “Bone and Ash,” which was performed in 13 U.S. cities. More than a hundred anthologies include Gomez’s fiction and poetry, and numerous publications, such as The New York Times, The Village Voice and Essence Magazine, have published her work.

On behalf of LGBTQ rights, Gomez’s activism is “grounded in the history of race and gender in America.” She wrote, “No one of us should feel we can leave someone behind in the struggle for liberation.” From 1985 to 1987, she served as a founding member of GLAAD. She has since served on the boards of numerous women’s and LGBTQ philanthropic and cultural organizations and as a commencement speaker for multiple educational institutions. She and her partner were among the litigants who sued the state of California for the right to legal same-sex marriage, and several of her articles were quoted extensively during the case.

Gomez received a literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and two fellowships from the California Arts Council. She has served on literature panels for the National Endowment for the Arts, the Illinois Arts Council and the California Arts Council.

She lives in San Francisco with her partner, Dr. Diane Sabin.

Puerto Rican Activist

b. January 18, 1986

“Being different should not be a reason to hate or discriminate against a person. There are more reasons to respect sexual diversity than stars in the universe.”

Francisco J. “El Jimagua” Cartagena Méndez is a Puerto Rican writer and well-known human rights activist. 

Cartagena was born an identical twin in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. His mother died from complications of diabetes when he was 11. He adopted the pseudonym El Jimagua at age 14, when he began to share his poetry on social media. The name derives from the word “twins” (jimagua) in Arahuac, the language of the island’s indigenous Taíno people. 

At age 18,  Cartagena came out to his father, who accepted the news unconditionally. Cartagena began his human rights activism soon thereafter. 

Cartagena was one of the principal promoters of “Boicot La Comay,” the boycott of a Puerto Rican television program that promoted homophobia and violence against gays. It resulted in the show’s cancellation. On the news outlet Univisión Puerto Rico, he denounced a religious group who had taken photos at a Gay Pride celebration in San Juan and posted them to a homophobic website with derogatory comments. 

Cartagena became a published author at the age of 22, when his book of gay-oriented poetry, “Vuelo en Liberta” (Flight in Freedom), was released. At the time, gay literature was rarely seen in Puerto Rico. The same year, the island’s lead newspaper, El Nuevo Día, hired him as its LGBTT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Transsexual) columnist. 

Cartagena writes for newspapers and blogs in Puerto Rico, the United States, Latin America and Europe. His numerous columns address topics such as sexual diversity, LGBTT suicide prevention and the effect of religious fundamentalism on LGBTT health.

In 2013 Cartagena and his partner, José Santiago, cofounded the nonprofit organization Fundación ASI (Inclusive Social Action Foundation) to advocate for socially disadvantaged communities, including LGBTT people, the elderly, children, and single mothers and fathers. The same year, he produced and directed a “El Fénix Erótico” (The Erotic Phoenix) in which he debuted as an actor. The sold-out show featured comedy, parodies and recitation of his poetry.

Cartagena won an international poetry contest in Argentina for his poem “A Free Land to Love” in 2014. In 2016 he organized Talk About Prevention, an awareness campaign aimed at averting pedophilia. He was also named the ambassador of an international project of ONG LGBT Spain, #PorUnFututoSinViolencia, designed to address bullying, homophobia and gender violence. 

In September 2017, Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico causing massive power failures and economic disaster. Although Cartagena faced his own hardship, he traveled to three heavily hit towns to provide humanitarian aid. At the end of October, Cartagena’s apartment remained without power. An intruder broke in, robbed him and stabbed him brutally three times.

Having survived the near-fatal attack, Cartagena continues his activism. His latest book, "Fundamentos de la Equidad y el Discrimen" (Fundamentals of Equity and Discrimination), was published in the fall of 2018.

Poet and Activist

b. April 16, 1957
d. November 4, 1995

“It is not enough to tell us that one was a brilliant poet, scientist, educator or rebel. Whom did he love? It makes a difference.”

Essex Hemphill was an American poet who wrote about race and identity in the 1980s. He was also an important voice during the AIDS crisis. His work has been described as fiercely political and lyrical. 

Born in Chicago and raised in Washington, D.C., Hemphill said that poetry became his refuge against the poverty and “otherness” he experienced as a young black man growing up in the nation’s capital. 

After briefly attending the University of Maryland to study journalism, Hemphill became immersed in the Washington art scene and regularly read at open-mic nights and coffeehouses. To showcase his work and that of other modern black artists and writers, he cofounded the Nethula Journal of Contemporary Literature in 1979. In 1982 he cofounded the spoken word group Cinque. 

Hemphill began publishing his poetry as chapbooks in 1985, including “Earth Life and Conditions.” In 1986 he received a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He gained national attention in 1989, when his work was published in the anthology “In the Life,” an important collection of writing by black gay men. 

Hemphill edited the acclaimed 1991 anthology “Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men,” for which he won a Lambda Literary Award. His first full-length poetry collection, “Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry,” won the National Library Association’s Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual New Author Award in 1992. His work is also included in “Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time” and “Life Sentences: Writers, Artists and AIDS,” and in the award-winning documentaries “Tongues Untied” and “Looking for Langston.”  

Hemphill has read his poetry to audiences of all sizes, from alternative theaters to the Kennedy Center and from New York to London. He received a grant from the Washington Arts Project to perform an experimental drama of poetry called “Murder on Glass,” and he has contributed to publications including Obsidian, Black Scholar, CALLALOO and Essence. 

E. Ethelbert Miller, director of the African American Resource Center at Howard University, said Hemphill’s words “put an end to silence” in the black LGBT community. 

“He was mesmerizing,” said Martin Duberman, Hemphill’s biographer. “He had these wonderful sort of alive eyes, and a beautiful speaking voice. It was electric.”

Hemphill died from complications of AIDS in 1995. He wrote about his experience with the disease in his most famous poem, “Vital Signs.” His published and unpublished works are collected at George Washington University’s Gelman Library.