He chairs the department of African American and African Studies and teaches English and creative writing at Rutgers University–Newark.Įugene Redmond, a fellow teacher at Southern Illinois University, helped to make Dumas's work available posthumous collections of Dumas's poetry include Play Ebony, Play Ivory (1974) and Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989). His recent honors include an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award, a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, and a 2018 John D. He has also translated the Brazilian author Hilda Hilst's novel Letters from a Seducer (Nightboat Books, 2014) and numerous other authors from Portuguese, French, and Spanish. John Keene's recent books include the story collection Counternarratives (New Directions, 2016) and several books of poetry.
In 1968, at the age of thirty-three, he was shot and killed by a New York City Transit Authority police officer. Upon his return, Dumas became active in the civil rights movement, married, had two sons, attended Rutgers University, worked for IBM, and taught at Hiram College in Ohio and at Southern Illinois University. He joined the air force in 1953 and spent a year on the Arabian Peninsula. Henry Dumas was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, in 1934 and moved to Harlem at the age of ten. Humming with life, Dumas's stories create a collage of midcentury Black experiences, interweaving religious metaphor, African cosmologies, diasporic folklore, and America's history of slavery and systemic racism. From the Deep South to the simmering streets of Harlem, his characters embark on real, magical, and mythic quests.
Africanfuturism, gothic romance, ghost story, parable, psychological thriller, inner-space fiction: Henry Dumas's stories form a vivid, expansive portrait of Black life in America.Ĭhampioned by Toni Morrison and Walter Mosley, Dumas's fabulist fiction is a masterful synthesis of myth and religion, culture and nature, mask and identity.
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