Amiri Baraka | Home: Social Essays
Poet, playwright, and political activist, Amiri Baraka is the recipient of Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and the Rockefeller Foundation Award for Drama. His controversial poem, “Somebody Blew Up America,” led the governor of New Jersey to call for Baraka’s resignation as the state’s Poet Laureate. Baraka has taught at Yale, Columbia, and the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Ed Bullins | The Hungered One
A force in American theater for more than 35 years, playwright and native Philadelphian Ed Bullins received the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for Best American Play for The Taking of Miss Janie. A multiple Obie Award-winner, Bullins is considered one of the key figures of the Black Arts movement of the 1960’s, along with Amiri Baraka. Originally published in 1971, The Hungered One is a collection of early short stories that explore loneliness, despair, and ambition. The New York Times Book Review writes, “A richness of language and observation pervades this collection of short stories.”

Sonia Sanchez | Homegirls and Handgrenades
“Only a poet with an innocent heart can exorcise so much pain with so much beauty,” writes Isabel Allende of poet, activist, and scholar Sonia Sanchez. Author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Shake Loose My Skin and Homegirls and Handgrenades, Sanchez is the recipient of numerous literary awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts Award and a Pew Fellowship in the Arts. Until retirement, she was the Laura Carnell Professor of English and Women's Studies at Temple University.

Charles Fuller | Moderator of the Renegades Panel
Saturday, April 18 at 2:00 PM
Author of many award-winning dramas for stage and screen, Philadelphia native Charles Fuller won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Soldier's Play, as well as Academy and Golden Globe Award nominations for his screen adaptation, A Soldier's Story, starring Denzel Washington. He is the recipient of grants from the Rockefeller Foundation, Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. A revival of his Obie Award-winning play Zooman and the Sign is running through the end of April at the Signature Theater Company in New York.