Daniel Black

(Daniel Black)

Daniel Black is a nationally renowned, award-winning novelist. His work is inspired by African-American life, history and the heritage in the South. His work has the themes of race, religion and sexuality. Daniel Black was born November 28th, 1965 in Kansas City, Kansas but spent most of his life in Blackwell Arkansas. After graduating from Clark College in Georgia in 1988, he was awarded a full scholarship to Temple University where he received his masters in 1990, followed by a doctorate in 1992, both in African-American studies. He then earned the Oxford Modern British Studies fellowship, which lead him to study at the Oxford University in 1987. At Oxford University, he studied          under Sonia Sanchez, who is the  poet laureate of the Black Arts                                                     Movement. (3) 

Current day, Daniel Black lives in Atlanta and is a professor of African-American studies and English at Clark Atlanta University and Morehouse College where he mentors writers since 1993. Daniel Black is also the founder of the Ndugu and Nzinga Rites of Passage Nation. Which is the mentoring society that teachers the principles and character to African-American youth. In that society, he is known as the Omotosho Jojomani. (3)

(Reading Excerpt) 

Daniel Black credits his great-grandmother, Stella Swinton childhood caregiver, for inspiring him to uplift humanity by writing these stories. Black was nominated for the Townsend Literary Prize, the Ernest J. Gaines Award. The Ferro-Grumley Literary Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Georgia Author of the Year Prize. He was awarded the Writer’s Award from the Middle-Atlantic Writers Association. One of Black’s most famous works is Perfect Peace. The Go on Girl! Book Club named him the Author of the year in 2011. Later in 2014, the book was chosen for “If All Arkansas Read the Same Book” by the Arkansas Center for the Book at the Arkansas State Library. 

Alice Walker, Pulitzer Prize winning author, describes the book about a young boy being raised as a girl until turning eight years old as “a spellbinding novel that kept me reading late into several nights….It is a gift to have so much passion, so much love, so much beautiful writing so flawlessly faithful to the language of ancestors who grappled as best they could with more than they could ever understand. This novel will one day be a film of much benefit to us, if done well. The visuals of it will help us see what we are so often blind to: the great fluidity inherent in all things, including ‘race’ and sexuality.” (2) 

(Cover of Don't Cry for Me) 

His most recent novel published in 2022, Don’t Cry for Me is inspired by his father's struggles with Alzheimer's, which the narrator ties the stories into his own ancestry in Arkansas. In novel, Jacob is dying from lung cancer and is struggling to scribble down his life lessons, regrets and the appreciation he has for his son and for a family. Jacob is writing a letter to his son trying to describe his childhood, growing up in Arkansas with his brother and being raised by his grandparents after the death of his mother and the disappearance of his father. They are the lessons he has taught as a young black man which is only two generations removed from slavery. Jacob tells the stories of the trials that were faced growing in the South, where education wasn’t important. As Jacob explores reading and literature you see an awakening within him. He no longer cares about who his son is in love with if he                                                                         is happy and healthy. He regrets letting that get between the two of them. (4)

(The Coming Cover)

In 2015, The Coming is a first-person account of the trauma and overcoming of Africans on a slave ship in the 16th century. Reviewers have described it as a “brilliant”, “poetic” and a literary homage to the lives of those Africans tossed into the sea”. (3) This novel is about slavery in America. It is narrated by an unnamed person who gets imprisoned and eventually gets put on a ship on the way to America. (5) The narrator describes the treatment of people of rape, murder, humiliation and lack of any human compassion. They are kept below the ship in one room suffering. As the ships arrive to America, many people have died. African people are present as sale, no one sees them and no one looks at them as human beings. The last to get sold was a man named Atiba. He was the trickster and was bought by a white couple he will murder in a few days. (1)

Works Cited:


The Coming. www.gradesaver.com/the-coming/study-guide/summary. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.

Daniel Daniel Black. allevents.in/duluth/meet-the-author-daniel-black/10000629432127437. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024. (1)

Daniel Black Bibliography. encyclopediaofarkansas.net/entries/daniel-black-7401/. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024. (3)

Daniel Black Reads an Excerpt from His New Book. www.youtube.com/watch?v=npLkboi7MNI. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024. (2)

Dont Cry for Me Cover. hcplibrary.overdrive.com/media/7227157.

Reimagining the Unthinkable: A Review of The Coming, by Daniel Black. 5 Oct. 2016, www.worldliteraturetoday.org/blog/book-reviews/reimagining-unthinkable-review-coming-daniel-black. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024.

Vulnerability and Growth in "Don't Cry for Me." 25 Feb. 2022, southernreviewofbooks.com/2022/02/25/dont-cry-for-me-daniel-black-review/#:~:text=In%20Don%E2%80%99t%20Cry%20for%20Me%2C%20Jacob%20is%20dying,also%20for%20a%20family%20that%20has%20long%20passed. Accessed 18 Feb. 2024. (4)