The District of Columbia was always an exciting hub of literary activitiy, with some of the country's most accomplished poets and authors making their home in the nation's capital as far back as the late 1800s when African American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar came to town and spent years building a creative life in the city while also working at the Library of Congress. There were others, however.

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THE LITERARY HISTORY CENTER'S COLLECTION mostly captures authors from the late 1960s through the present.

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THE PATH FINDERS broke through barriers, claiming their place among the pantheon of creatives while expanding the literary canon and fortifying the African American community in Washington, DC and beyond.​​​​​​

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BARRIER BREAKERS

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GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON

LANGSTON HUGHES

PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

MAY MILLER SULLIVAN

STERLING A. BROWN

GWENDOLYN BROOKS

ELOISE GREENFIELD

LUCILLE CLIFTON

SHARON BELL MATHIS

JENNIFER LAWSON

DAPHNE MUSECAR

OLIVIA HERRON

E. ETHELBERT MILLER

JONETTA ROSE BARRAS

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BIOGRAPHIES

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GEORGIA DOUGLAS JOHNSON (1880-1966): With 200 poems, 38 plays and 31 short stories to her credit, no one could ever deny Georgia Douglas Johnson’s important contribution to the African American literary canon or the indisputably critical role she played in the Black writing community and much of the country. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, she graduated from Atlanta University in 1896 and received a degree from Oberlin Conservatory in 1903. That same year, she married Henry Lincoln “Linc” Johnson, a lawyer, 10 years her senior who was involved in local and national politics. The couple had two sons. In 1910, the family moved to the District of Columbia. Her husband was subsequently appointed Recorder of Deeds in 1912 by then-President William Howards Taft.

 

Johnson didn’t publish her first poems until she was in her mid-30s. She proved a prolific writer and a powerful literary force. In Washington, DC she remains a legend.

 

She was both a literary arbiter and a bridge between two geographic worlds, often facilitating interactions between African American writers based in New York and those in DC—all of whom were members of The New Negro Movement, which some historians incorrectly labeled The Harlem Renaissance. Many of the writers who called New York had once been in the nation’s capital. Langston Hughes lived and worked in the city from 1922-1924. Jean Toomer was born in DC in 1894 as were May Miller Sullivan and Gwendolyn Bennett.

 

Often leaders of the New Negro Movement would gather on Saturday nights at Johnson’s home on S St., NW. They were dubbed the “Saturday nighters” and could include W.E. B. DuBois or Jessie Fauset and even Zora Neal Hurston.

 

Johnson received awards for her plays and poetry. Little has been said, however, about the fine poems she wrote for children that appeared in several of the first-rate magazines of her day, including The Brownies’ Book.

 

While researchers and literary historians persist in tagging her as a member of the “Harlem Renaissance,” Johnson was one of the leaders of The New Negro Movement but remained a DC resident until her death in 1966.

 

MAY MILLER SULLIVAN (1899-1995): Born in Washington, DC, on the campus of Howard University, she developed her interest in creative writing under the tutelage of her father, Kelly Miller. An author, philosopher, professor of sociology and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Howard University, he was among the first African Americans hired on the faculty. Miller was introduced to artists and intellectuals. For a time, Paul Laurence Dunbar was a guest at the family’s home. Langston Hughes was one of her personal and literary friends.

 

Miller began writing her own poetry when she was around six years old and was first published at 13 in The School Progress magazine. She received a check for twenty-five cents.

 

After graduating from the famed M Street School, later named Dunbar High School. She enrolled at 16 years old in Howard University, continuing her literary focus. She was immersed in an environment that included some of the most accomplished African Americans writers of her day, including Montgomery Gregory, a leader of the National Negro Theater Movement and founder of the famed Howard Players, and Alain Leroy Locke, considered by some to have been the Dean of The Harlem Renaissance and the first Black Rhodes Scholar from the United States.

 

Miller graduated from Howard at the top of her class in 1920, and later studied poetry and drama at American University and Columbia University. In 1914, The Washington Post published her short story “Wireless in Squirreldom.” In 1925, like Hughes, Hurston and Contee Cullen, Miller won the “Opportunity” magazine award; she was selected third place in drama. She eventually returned to Washington, DC and married John “Bud” Sullivan, a high school principal; (they were together for 41 years, until his death in 1982.)

 

She taught for 20 years at Frederick Douglass High School in Baltimore. A medical condition forced her retirement in 1945. She also had been a lecturer or writer-in residence at several schools and colleges, including the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, Monmouth College and Phillips Exeter Academy.

 

In the 1960s, she turned her attention to Washington, DC’s children and the city’s arts community. She met frequently with young writers, including the co-founders of IPSAAW, jonetta rose barras and Sheila Crider, at her apartment at 16th and S Streets Northwest. Ironically, Miller lived only a few blocks away from where Georgia Douglas Johnson had held her famous Saturday Night Salons that Miller often attended.

 

During her productive career, Miller served as the poetry coordinator for Friends of the Arts in the DC Public Schools. She chaired the literature panel of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. She also served on the Poetry Committee at the Folger Shakespeare Library. In 1977, she read her poetry during the inauguration of President Jimmy Carter. In 1981, she published a book of children’s poetry Halfway to the Sun, after having other poems appear in various anthology; When Miller died in 1995, then U.S. Rep. the Honorable Donald Payne (New Jersey Democrat) read her achievements into the “Congressional Record” from the House floor.

 

STERLING A. BROWN (1901-1989): In 1994, for what would have been Sterling A. Brown’s 93rd birthday, the Howard County Poetry and Literature Society held a celebration that featured Michael Harper, poet laureate of Rhode Island, reading from the book he had edited–The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown. Among other things, Harper told the story about one day being questioned by his son when he mentioned he was on his way to Washington, DC. When his four-year-old son wanted to know, would he be back. “I don’t know, “Harper replied.

 

Then, right on time, his son said “‘Let me be wid ole Jazzbo...’ and snapped his fingers.

 

”He had, in fact, recited the closing line of one of Brown’s most popular poems– “The Odyssey of Big Boy,” inspired by Tennessee coal-miner Calvin “Big Boy” Davis. “Sterling had an audience–even among children,” said Harper.

 

Sterling Allen Brown was born on the campus of Howard University. He attended Dunbar High School. One of his instructors was Jessie Redmon Fauset, a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the editor of the Brownie’s Book: A Magazine for Children of the Sun. By the time he was 17, Brown was on his way to Williams College—with a scholarship. In 1922, he enrolled in Harvard University. After receiving his master’s degree, he began teaching English at Virginia Seminary and College in Lynchburg. During his stay in the rural south, he met some of the characters that would subsequently visit his poetry and other writings. More important, he gained an unwavering respect for their contributions to America—not just Black America.

 

In 1927, Brown married Daisy Turnbull. They were together until her death in 1979. After their marriage, he began teaching at Fisk. Then, he taught at Lincoln University. In 1929, he joined Howard University’s faculty; he taught there for 40 years.

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In 1932, Brown published his first collection of poetry, Southern Road, causing some writers like James Weldon Johnson to reverse their earlier criticism of the so-called Black dialect. Brown was national editor of Negro Affairs for the Federal Writers’ Project between 1936 to 1940, and often clashed with white Southern writers.

 

His publisher, Harcourt, Brace, rejected his second book–No Hiding Place. His regular column for Opportunity magazine, his insightful anthologies, and the dynamism of his teaching became the focus of his work. In 1969, he retired.

 

Fortunately, literary critic and historian Stephen Henderson, director of Howard’s Institute for the Arts and Humanities, coaxed Brown out of retirement, appointing him as a senior fellow. A new generation of Black writers and the District of Columbia’s literary community were renewed by his return.

 

Brown’s first book was subsequently reissued by Beacon Press. Broadside Press, an independent, African American company published what became his second book, The Last Ride of Wild Bill. May 1, 1979, was proclaimed Sterling Brown Day in the District of Columbia. He jokingly told The Washington Post, “I’ve been rediscovered, reinstituted, regenerated and recovered.” In 1984, urged by poets E. Ethelbert Miller and Grace Cavalier along with cultural historian James Early, Mayor Marion Barry appointed Brown as Washington, DC’s, first poet laureate.

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GWENDOLYN BROOKS (1917-2000): If one person in Black literary history could be seen as a representative of the expanse of African American literature, which might be Gwendolyn Brooks. She was inspired and was affected as a writer by The New Negro Movement and the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. She came to serve as a bridge between those two eras while winning significant national awards and carving her own unique, revolutionary path.

 

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas. Her family relocated to Chicago, Illinois. She demonstrated an enthusiasm for reading and a talent for writing, which were supported by her mother and father. By the time she was 13 years old, her first poem “Eventide” had been published in American Childhood; at 17 she was regularly publishing in the Chicago Defender. Growing as a writer, Brooks reached out to Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson for an evaluation and advice, positioning them as unofficial mentors.

 

Brooks graduated from Woodrow Wilson Junior College in 1936. Three years later, she married Henry Blakely; the couple eventually had two children. By 1944, Brooks was attracting the attention of mainstream editors and publishers. According to historians, one such editor receiving her work at Harper & Brothers (which later became Harper Collins) reached out to Richard Wright, himself a literary star, for commentary about the poems she sent. His praise was effusive: “…Miss Brooks is real and so are her poems.

 

”The next year, in 1945, Harper & Brothers, published A Street in Bronzeville.” In 1949, the company put out Annie Allen. In 1950, she won the Pulitzer for Poetry for that book, making her the first Black writer to win that prestigious award.

 

Speaking at a memorial, following her death in 2000, Rita Dove, the second African American to receive the prize—in 1987, 37 years after Brooks--talked about her discovery at 17 years old while combing the shelves of her local library. Brooks’ poems “leapt off the pages of the book in my hand and struck me like a thunderbolt.” Dove said from that day forward she read everything Brooks wrote.

 

In 1967, in the opening chapters of the Black Arts Movement, Brooks participated in a conference at Fisk University, where a new, more radical generation of writers were gathered. Soon after, she became an activist in that movement. Despite that shift, she named Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, and held the position for 32 years.

 

Then, Brooks shocked the established literary world when she chose to leave Harper & Row. She placed her books with the independent Broadside Press that had been launched by Dudley Randle. Later in her career, she also published with the Chicago-based Third World Press.

 

When she arrived in the District of Columbia in 1985, as the first Black person appointed U.S. Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the local literary community embraced her.

 

In her tribute to Brooks, Dove, then Poet Laureate to the Library of Congress (the name was changed from consultant to laureate in 1986) said that “As someone who, as a Black child, was educated in a literary tradition that seemed to have little use for my existence except as a caricature or in servitude and who, as a young person, came of age in a society where the discourse of the melting pot effectively translated into: ‘Disappear into the mainstream or Else,’ I know that Gwendolyn Brooks was among the few who gave me courage to insist on my own story….”

 

ELOISE GREENFIELD (1929-2021): Throughout her storied career, Greenfield, who often spoke softly and abandoned early thoughts of being a teacher because of shyness, frequently had to fight against racism in the publishing industry as she sought to bring stories to African American children that helped them understand their history and value in the world.

 

She must have been victorious. By the time of her death, she had published 48 books—mostly for children. She became—and remains—one of the most popular children’s authors from the period that literary historian Daphne Muse and others considered “The Golden Era of Children’s Literature,” between the 1960s and 1980s.

 

Born in Parmele, North Carolina, Greenfield’s family relocated to Washington, DC, when she was three months old. She was the second oldest of the five children. She graduated from the city’s public school system and enrolled in Miner’s Teachers College in 1946. Three years later, she decided her shy personality might not be suitable for the world of teaching. She took a job as a clerk typist in the federal government for several years before deciding to spend more time with her husband and two children. As a full-time homemaker, her attention turned to writing.

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She submitted poems and stories that often were rejected. But in 1962 the Hartford Times accepted “To A Violin.” The Negro Digest also accepted a story here and there. In 1971, Greenfield joined the DC Writer’s Workshop, becoming a co-founder with Annie Crittenden and Sharon Bell Mathis. Greenfield initially was the director of the adult division. The next year, in 1972, Drum and Spear Press published her first children’s book Bubbles; that book had been rejected 10 times before it was accepted by the independent company.

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In 1973, Greenfield’s book about Rosa Parks was published. Her career soon took off. It wasn’t all smooth sailing, however. Greenfield still received rejections. Sometimes, she found herself struggling with an editor. Not every fight ended badly, however. In one case, an editor battling an editor turn down Greenfield’s pitch to make Honey I Love a picture book. Instead, she encouraged Greenfield to use the poem as an anchor for a collection of poetry. “So that’s what I did. I didn’t have many books at that time, and writing professionally was still fairly new to me. I was very excited about doing it,” Greenfield told an interviewer, adding that she admired poets like Lucille Clifton, Gwendolyn Brooks and Sterling Brown.

 

Greenfield received numerous awards and accolades including the Boston Globe-Horn Book Award (Childtimes), The DC Mayor’s Award in Literature (1983), Living Legacy Award from the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, the Coretta Scott King Award in 1976 (Africa Dream) The Coretta Scott King-Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement (2018), the Hurston/Wright Foundation North Star Award for Lifetime Achievement to name a few.

 

LUCILLE CLIFTON (1936-2010): In a 2007 interview with the Poetry Foundation, Lucille Clifton confessed that her heart belonged to poetry. “Poetry is where my heart is. That’s something I must do,” said Clifton. “Children’s books—I choose to do that; I respect and value it, but I don’t have to do it.

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”And yet, Clifton wrote 20 books for children. She said her job as a literature assistant for the Central Atlantic Regional Educational Library of the Department of Education from 1960 to 1971 required her to “find books with characters in them that looked like my children, which is why I started writing children’s books. I wanted to have my children be able to relate to someone like that.

 

“American children’s literature ought to mirror American children. That seems quite obvious to me,” Clifton said during an event in 2016 presented by Cave Canem, a national Black writers’ organization.

 

Born in Depew, New York, Clifton arrived in Washington, DC. in 1953 to attend Howard University. She was 16 years old with a scholarship and a plan to devote herself to drama. Somehow, she lost that scholarship and went back to New York, enrolling in the State University of New York, Fredonia. By 1958, she had married Fred Clifton, a sculptor who was also a professor of philosophy at the University of Buffalo; the two became friends with writer Ishmael Reed, who subsequently introduced Clifton’s writings to Langston Hughes; he published her in his anthology—The Poetry of the Negro.

 

In 1967, the Cliftons moved to Baltimore, Maryland. Two years later, in 1969, her first book of poetry, Good Times, was released; it was listed as one the New York Times’ 10 Best Books of the Year. Her career took off unimpeded–although at the time she had six children aged seven, five, four, three, two and one.

 

Few people who gravitated to her poetry and saluted its originality and power, knew that she had also begun to write children’s books. “[When] Good Times was first accepted by Random House, someone knew I had children and wanted to know if I had ever tried writing for children. I had not. But I did tell my kids stories.

 

“I started thinking about what I could do in the field, and I came up with the first book of Everett Anderson, Some of the Days of Everett Anderson. I found that I was able to write for children. It seems quite easy, but it’s not necessarily so,” Clifton told the Poetry Foundation.

 

Everett Anderson was sometimes written in African American vernacular English and grappled with sobering issues people falsely assume children don’t think about or aren’t overly affected by. Everett Anderson’s Good Good-bye, for example, finds the protagonist struggling with the death of his father. It won the 1984 Coretta Scott King Award.

 

During her lifetime, Clifton won creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1970 and 1973), the Shelly Memorial Award (1991/1992) and the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988-2000. In 2007, she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, which came with a cash award of $100. Most remarkably, in 1988, Clifton became the first author ever to have two books (Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980 and Next: New Poems) to be selected as finalists for a Pulitzer in Poetry.

 

Clifton was the Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979-1985) and served as visiting writer or writer-in-residence at several universities, including Columbia University School of Arts, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, George Washington University in Washington, DC, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Dartmouth College. After her death in 2010, Clifton’s daughter Sidney led the effort to purchase the family’s former home in Baltimore. It has been renovated into a writer’s retreat and community center. The Clifton House is also another tangible example of one of those celebrations of survival for which Lucille Clifton’s poetry and her children’s books are known.

 

SHARON BELL MATHIS was born in New Jersey, lived for a while in New York and moved to DC, after graduating from Morgan State University, where she earned a degree in sociology. She subsequently taught at the university. In 1975, she earned a master’s in library science from Catholic University. By then, Sharon’s career as an author of children’s literature was already in full swing. Her works were brought to the attention of publishers by a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. The rest is history, as the saying goes. Sharon became a celebrated, award-winning author. One of her early middle-grade novels, Sidewalk Story, was chosen as a Child Study Association of America’s Children’s Book of the Year. Tea Cup Full of Roses, another middle-grade, was recognized as a notable title by the American Library Association (ALA). In 1974, she won the Coretta Scott King Author Award for her picture book, Ray Charles. (Illustrator George Ford won the first Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award for that title too.) And in 1976, Sharon won a Newbery Honor for The Hundred Penny Box, illustrated by Leo and Diane Dillon. Whether writing about the life of Ray Charles, exploring the rich bond between a boy and his great-great aunt in The Hundred Penny Box or a girl with a dream of running like the greats in Running Girl: The Diary of Ebonee Rose, Bell Mathis’ writes stories that celebrate the fortitude, resilience and beauty of African-Americans.

 

JENNIFER LAWSON first marched for civil rights in 1963 as a 16-year-old in what became known as the Children’s Crusade in support of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been jailed in Birmingham, AL She attended Tuskegee University and eventually left to work fulltime with the Student NonViolent Coordinating Committee in Lowndes County, Al., where she drew billboards, comics, booklets, and leaflets in support of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, publicizing the work of the people of Lowndes County and their political party's symbol, the black panther. She is featured in an award-winning 2022 film about this subject, Lowndes County and the Road to Black Power.

 

In 1968, she helped establish Drum and Spear Bookstore and Drum and Spear Press. She illustrated and co-authored the book Children of Africa and oversaw the translation and publication of a Kiswahili version, Watoto wa Afrika in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Jennifer later became the first chief programming executive at PBS.

 

In the 1990s she was named one of the “101 Most Influential People in Entertainment Today,” by Entertainment Weekly. In 2016, she was honored with the Ralph Lowell Award, public television’s highest award. Currently, she is a board member of the SNCC Legacy Project and has been actively working in its partnership at Duke University to create the SNCC Digital Gateway.

 

DAPHNE MUSE is a writer, activist, educator, social commentator and cultural broker. Born in Washington, DC, Muse subsequently left the city for California in 1971 after working at Drum and Spear Bookstore where she began her life-long career in children’s literature, as radio host, instructor and author.

 

After her move to California, she later became a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley. After two years as a fellow as the Elder-in-Residence at the Black Studies Collaboratory in Abolitionist Democracy in the Department of African American and Diaspora Studies, she now teaches Ebony Visions and Cowrie Shell Dreams: Black Storytelling and Children’s Literature Across the Generations. She has published four books focused on Black and multicultural children’s literature. She also has worked with editorial teams at Scholastic, Inc. and developed curricula for school districts and projects in Oakland, San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Georgetown, Guyana.

 

Muse currently is working on The Collard Green Chronicles, a collaborative memoir with her friend of more than 50 years Jennifer Lawson. She resides in Brentwood, California where she oversees her archives of more than 5,000 letters documenting the Pan African, Black Power and Civil Rights movements and a rare book collection containing more than 3,000 Black children’s books.

 

CAROLIVIA HERRON, Ph. D. is an African American Jewish author and educator living in Washington, DC. She lectures in Humanities, Classics and Creative Writing in the English Department at Howard University. Her signature course at Howard University is Blacks in Antiquity. She received her doctorate in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory from the University of Pennsylvania, and has held professorial appointments at Harvard University, Mount Holyoke College, California State University, Chico, and the College of William and Mary.

 

She makes school appearances as part of the Pen/Faulkner Writers in Schools program and gives writing workshops for Jewish organizations such as the Highlights Foundation and Lilith magazine. She is a judge for the Jewish Publication Council awards program. Herron’s publications include Nappy Hair, Always An Olivia, Peacesong DC, Thereafter Johnnie and Asenath and the Origin of Nappy Hair. Herron has also published the critical edition, The Selected Works of Angelina Weld Grimké (Oxford University Press, 1991). Her multimedia novel, Asenath and Our Song of Songs, is scheduled for publication in 2024. In spring 2022, she was one of seven authors commissioned by Theater J, the premier Jewish Theater of the United States, to write a play focusing on her African American, Wampanoag and Jewish heritage.

 

Herron is the librettist for the opera, Let Freedom Sing: The Story of Marian Anderson, composed by Bruce Adolphe. Let Freedom Sing was commissioned by the Washington National Opera in 2009 and was performed in 2023 by the Mobile Opera of Alabama.

 

E. ETHELBERT MILLER is a literary activist and author of two memoirs and several poetry collections, including The Collected Poems of E. Ethelbert Miller, a comprehensive collection that represents over 40 years of his work. His poetry has been translated into nearly a dozen languages. He is also the author of several poems for children.

 

He hosts the WPFW morning radio show On the Margin with E. Ethelbert Miller and hosts and produces The Scholars on University of the District of Columbia-TV which received a 2020 Telly Award. He is associate editor and a columnist for The American Book Review. Miller was given a 2020 congressional award from the Honorable Jamie Raskin, member U.S. House of Representatives in recognition of his literary activism and awarded the 2022 Howard Zinn Lifetime Achievement Award by the Peace and Justice Studies Association. He also was named a 2023 Grammy Nominee Finalist for Best Spoken Word Poetry Album. Ethelbert’s latest book is How I Found Love Behind the Catcher's Mask, published by City Point Press.

 

Born in the Bronx, New York, Miller arrived in DC during the late 1960s as a student at Howard University just as the Black Arts Movement dawned. Stephen Henderson, a literary scholar, recently hired by Howard became one of Miller’s mentors, helping to draw him deeper into literature and motivating him to become involved in the creation of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities. Soon after he graduated in 1974, Miller helped establish the African-American Resource Center--an institution he led and grew for 40 years, creating a historical, cultural and literary archives that rivaled special collections of other academic facilities.

 

From that perch and as the founder and director of Ascension Poetry Reading Series, Miller established himself as a prime literary influencer, a role he continues to play. The diversity of the writers whose careers he favorably affected is phenomenal. He quietly aided Gwendolyn Brooks in a variety of efforts while she was the Poetry Consultant for the Library of Congress. He was part of a team of individuals who were responsible for Sterling A. Brown being named the first Poet Laureate of DC. He was an organizer or adviser for nearly every writers’ conference held in the District of Columbia. He featured emerging children’s authors like Sharon Bell Mathis and Eloise Greenfield on his programs.

 

Miller is a two-time Fulbright Senior Specialist Program Fellow to Israel. He holds an honorary degree of Doctor of Literature from Emory and Henry College and has taught at several universities, including American University and George Mason University.

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