Amiri Baraka 

Amiri Baraka (born Everett LeRoi Jones; October 7, 1934 – January 9, 2014), formerly known as LeRoi Jones and Imamu Amear Baraka, was an African-American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, essays and music criticism. He was the author of numerous books of poetry and taught at a number of universities, including the State University of New York at Buffalo and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He received the PEN Open Book Award, formerly known as the Beyond Margins Award, in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.

Baraka’s career spanned nearly fifty years, and his themes range from Black liberation to White racism. Some poems that are always associated with his name are “The Music: Reflection on Jazz and Blues,” “The Book of Monk,” and “New Music, New Poetry", works that draw on topics from the worlds of society, music, and literature. Baraka's poetry and writing have attracted both extreme praise and condemnation. Within the African-American community, some compare Baraka to James Baldwin and recognize him as one of the most respected and most widely published Black writers of his generation. Others have said his work is an expression of violence, misogyny, homophobia and racism. Regardless of viewpoint, Baraka’s plays, poetry, and essays have been defining texts for African-American culture.

Baraka's brief tenure as Poet Laureate of New Jersey (2002–03) involved controversy over a public reading of his poem "Somebody Blew Up America?" and accusations of anti-semitism, and some negative attention from critics, and politicians.

Christopher Bigsby 

Christopher William Edgar Bigsby FRSA FRSL (born 27 June 1941) is a British literary analyst and novelist, with more than forty books to his credit. Earlier in his writing career, his books were published under the name C. W. E. Bigsby.

Educated at the Universities of Sheffield and Nottingham, he is Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. He is also an occasional contributor to BBC Radio, and presented Kaleidoscope (Radio 4) for eight years in the 1980s. During this time, he collaborated with the writer Malcolm Bradbury on an 8-part comedy series called 'Patterson', which followed the experiences of a new lecturer at a provincial university, and may have been partly autobiographical. Unusually this series was broadcast on Radio Three. His first book was Confrontation and Commitment: A Study of Contemporary American Drama, 1959-66 (1967). One of Bigsby's recent novels, first published in March 2002, is the well-reviewed Beautiful Dreamer. His latest novel is One Hundred Days, One Hundred Nights, published August 23, 2007 by Methuen (ISBN 0413776565).

Bigsby is also considered one of the world's best analysts of American theatre, and in particular the definitive commentator on playwright Arthur Miller. Bigsby's books on Miller include, but are not limited to, Remembering Arthur Miller (2005), Arthur Miller & Company (1990), The Cambridge Companion to Arthur Miller (1997), and the definitive work on the great American playwright, the 514-page Arthur Miller: A Critical Study (2005). In November 2008, Bigsby published Arthur Miller, a definitive biography of the eminent American playwright, based on boxes of papers Miller made available to him before his death in 2005, as well as countless interviews and conversations during a friendship with the playwright that lasted over three decades. Harvard University Press published the 739-page biography of Miller in the United States on May 21, 2009 and titled Arthur Miller 1915-1962.[1] The second volume of Bigsby's biography of the playwright, Arthur Miller 1962-2005, is scheduled for release in February 2011. Christopher Bigsby has also presented the University of East Anglia's International Literary Festival for over twenty years, from which four volumes of edited interviews have been published as the "Writers in Conversation" series (Volumes 1 and 2 first published by Pen & Inc in 2001 and Volumes 3 and 4 first published by Unthank Books in 2011).

In 2006 Bigsby published Remembering and Imagining the Holocaust: The Chain of Memory, a meditative study on memory and on the ways in which memory has operated in the work of writers for whom the Holocaust was a defining event. The book includes essays on Jean Améry, Tadeusz Borowski, Anne Frank, Rolf Hochhuth, Primo Levi, Arthur Miller, W.G. Sebald, Elie Wiesel and Peter Weiss

Bigsby was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007