Concepción Arenal was a Spanish feminist writer and activist who founded the feminist movement in Spain. Arenal was born in 1820 in Ferrol, Galicia. In 1829, she and her family moved to Armaño following the death of her father. Arenal witnesses the social inequalities of the time, including the gender inequality imposed by the patriarchal …
Harper Lee was an American novelist best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’. The book has become a classic of modern American literature. Lee was born Nelle Harper Lee in 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama to Amasa Coleman Lee and Francis Cunningham “Finch” Lee. Finch Lee was a lawyer, and while Lee …
Daisy Bates was an American journalist and civil rights activist who is best known for playing a leading role in the Little Rock Integration Crisis of 1957. Bates was born in 1914 in Huttig, Arkansas. Bates was adopted as a baby after her mother was murdered when attempting to resist being raped by three white …
Alice Walker is an American novelist, story story writer, poet and civil rights activist. She is best known for her critically acclaimed novel The Color Purple, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Walker was born in 1944 in Putnam County, Georgia. Walker lived under Jim Crow Laws, but her parents refused to …
Ethel L. Payne was an African-American journalist, publisher, civil rights leader, and educator known as the “First Lady of the Black Press”. Payne was born in 1911 in Chicago, Illinois and grew up in Englewood, which was a black community surrounded by white neighbourhoods. Payne’s father died when she was 12, and her mother was …
Ntozake Shange is an American playwright and poet best known for the Obie Award-winning play for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf. She is a self-proclaimed black feminist, and her work frequently addresses race and feminism. Shange was born Paulette L. Williams in 1948 in Trenton, New Jersey, where …
Gwendolyn Brooks was an American poet and teacher. She was the first black author to win a Pulitzer prize, the first black woman to become poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and the Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death. Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson and …
Georgia Douglas Johnson was an important figure of the Harlem Renaissance and the first modern African-American female poet and playwright to gain widespread recognition. Johnson was born in 1877 in Atlanta, Georgia to parents of mixed ancestry including african and native american on her mother, Laura Jackson Camp’s side, and african-american and english heritage on …
Zadie Smith is a British novelist, essayist, and short story writer best known for her novel, White Teeth. Smith was born in 1975 in London, England. Her mother, Yvonne Bailey had grown up in Jamaica and moved to England in 1969 and her father Harvey Smith was English. As a child, Smith enjoyed tap dancing …
Octavia E. Butler was a world renowned African-American science fiction novelist and the first African-American woman to gain popularity and critical acclaim as a major science fiction writer. Her novels include Patternmaster, Kindred, Dawn and Parable of the Sower. Butler was born in 1947 in Pasadena, California. Her father died at an early age, and …