Amiri Baraka

Originally recognized by the jazz world as the author of Blues People: Negro Music in White America, issued in 1964, and Black Music, which followed three years later, both under the name LeRoi Jones, Amiri Baraka—born Everett LeRoi Jones—pursued a wide-ranging career as poet, playwright, critic, and novelist. Earlier still, he aligned himself with the New York School and the Beats, earning a place in Donald Allen’s anthology The New American Poetry. His debut poetry collection, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, appeared in 1961. Alongside Diane Di Prima he launched and co-edited the influential Floating Bear newsletter. He established the Black Arts Repertory Theater/School and received an Obie Award in 1964 for his drama Dutchman. During the final years of the decade he emerged as a forceful voice in the black nationalist movement and served as a close associate and spiritual godfather to the Black Panther Party. After adopting the name Imamu Amiri Baraka he discarded the prefix “Imamu,” a Muslim term denoting spiritual leadership, in 1970. He abandoned his nationalist position in 1974 in favor of a Marxist/Leninist outlook and came to be viewed as among the most consequential African-American literary figures of the twentieth century. In 1968 he documented the provocative work Black Mass with Sun Ra & His Arkestra for the Jihad label; twelve years later he collaborated with saxophonist David Murray on New Music New Poetry, released by India Navigation. With his wife Amina Baraka he issued a further volume of music criticism, The Music: Reflections on Jazz and Blues, in 1987. He held teaching appointments at SUNY Buffalo and Columbia University and later served as professor of Africana studies at SUNY, Stony Brook. A longtime Newark resident, Baraka was named New Jersey poet laureate, a post later eliminated amid the uproar generated by his post-9/11 poem “Somebody Blew Up America.” On January 9, 2014, he died at Newark’s Beth Israel Medical Center from surgical complications at the age of seventy-nine.