LeRoi Jones

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=Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka)=

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Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) was born in 1934 in Newark, New Jersey. After studying literature and religion at Rutgers and Howard Universities, he served in the air force for three years. He then moved to Greenwich Village in New York City in 1957, and during the next couple years he befriended some of the beat generation poets, including Allen Ginsberg, Diane Di Prima, and Jack Kerouac. He was also associated with the poets Frank O'Hara and Gilbert Sorrentino. Jones supported the free form of the beat's poetry, and he even published their work in his literary magazine Yugen and in his Totem Press. Jones co-edited Yugen and Totem Press with his Jewish wife, Hettie Cohen, and he also established and edited (along with Diane Di Prima) a literary newsletter called The Floating Bear, between 1961 and 1963. The period of 1958-1962 is commonly referred to as his Beat Period.

Between 1958 and 1965, Leroi Jones gained notoriety for his poetry, namely Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note and also his plays  The Slave, The Toilet, and Dutchman all of which demonstrated his growing distrust of and tension with white society. During this period he also experimented in   recording his poetry    with the Avant-Garde Jazz group,     '''New York Art Quartet. '''

After the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, Jones decided to change his life according to his black cultural nationalist views. He divorced his wife, Hettie, and left Greenwich Village for Harlem--a move that many identify as the symbolic birth of the Black Arts Movement. In Harlem, he founded the Black Arts Repertory Theater School (BARTS), which signified the formal beginning of Black Arts and the foundation of the "Black aesthetic" as a distinct literary, artistic, spiritual, and cultural force that existed apart from the traditional white establishment.

Jones changed his name to Amiri Baraka when he converted to Islam in 1967. Shortly thereafter, in 1969, he published Black Magic, his collection of Black Nationalist poetry. He continued to support the Black Arts and Black Power Movements until around 1974, when he again underwent a significant ideological change--this time from support of Black Nationalism to Marxist Leninism.

He has continued to publish poetry collections and essays over the past thirty years, in addition to holding teaching positions at several universities. Most notable is his collection of Marxist poetry, Hard Facts, and also his controversial recent poetry collection, Somebody Blew Up America, and Other Poems..