User:Beautybella

Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, but lived with his grandmother in Lawrence, Kansas until he was thirteen and then with his mother in Lincoln, Illinois and Cleveland, Ohio where he went to high school. During the time Hughes lived with his grandmother, there were problems between his parents who divorced and he didn’t understand the situation well. He grew up very insecure and unsure of himself, with his grandmother’s death, he moved back to first mother in Illinois, and his poetry was published in the central high monthly. Around that time he came to have many influential’s such as Carl Sandburg and Walk Whitman. In his junior year during the summer, he went to live with his father in Toluca, Mexico. They didn’t get along very well, and this was quite painful for Hughes. This contributed to his maturity level, with this he developed his own unique style of writing. On his second visit to his father he wrote his most famous piece “the negro speaks of river“. Hughes wanted to be a writer but his father wanted him to become an engineer because it would mean a much more stable lifestyle at least money-wise. After displaying his skills to his father by sending some of his poetry to the Brownies Book and Crisis magazines which was accepted ,his father was impressed and agreed to pay a year of college at Columbia for him. In the fall of 1921 ,Hughes entered Columbia university, he only stayed for a year than dropped out with a b+ average. At the same time he found Harlem and it became a second home to him. There he came to know some of the greatest influential’s in his time as Countee Cullen, Claude McCay, W.E.B. Dubois, and James Weldon Johnson. His career launched in 1925 when the wearies blue won first prize in the opportunity magazine literary contest in his poetry he uses African American music, mostly blues and jazz and his first volume “The weary blues” was released .his distinction in his writing set poetry off from other writers, it allowed him to be completely free. Langston received his B.A degree in 1929 in Lincoln university, which was paid by a scholarship. In 1926 “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" appeared in the nation. Hughes wrote about Black writers and poets, "who would surrender racial pride in the name of a false integration,".Hughes points out, "No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself." He explained, "We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren't, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too... If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either. We build our temples for tomorrow, as strong as we know how and we stand on the top of the mountain, free within ourselves." With his fame rising he turned to politics and began to have  an interest in socialism, he wrote a lot of poetry during that time, they were publish in mass. Around  the 1930s ,he started an interest in theater and he wrote the  “Mulatto”, a drama about miscegenation and the South, it was the longest running Broadway play written by an African American until 1958 when the raisin in the sun came out. Hughes always had money problems, though he supported himself, he wasn’t financially stable. In 1951 he published "Montage of a Dream Deferred," . After montage of dreams he wrote more than twenty additional works until his death. Hughes traveled to such places has Senegal, Nigeria, the Cameroons, Belgium Congo, Angola, and Guinea in Africa, and later to Italy and France, Russia and Spain. Hughes loved to spend all his time in clubs listening to blues, jazz and writing poetry. Hughes point out an in interview "I tried to write poems like the songs they sang on Seventh Street... (These songs) had the pulse beat of the people who keep on going." In his later years, Langston Hughes was, deemed the "Poet Laureate of the Negro Race,". Hughes meant to represent the black race in his writing and he was, perhaps, the most original of all African American poets. On May 22, 1967 Langston Hughes died after having had abdominal surgery. Hughes' funeral, like his poetry, was all blues and jazz.

Ntozake shange

Born in Trenton ,new jersey on October 18,1948 Her were upper middle class African Americans ,so in her childhood, it wasn’t hard to meet people like Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Chuck Berry, and W. E. B. Du Bois around her house. 1966 she enrolled in Barnard college, just around the time ,her and her husband divorced, she had many suicide attempts brought from the pain of the divorce. She made it through and graduated in American Studies in 1970. originally her name was Paulette Williams ,in 1971 she changed it to Ntozake shange which means "she who comes with her own things" and "she who walks like a lion" in Xhosa, the Zulu language. She has written many plays, poetry, novels, and essays. She taught at California State College, the City College of New York, the University of Houston, Rice University, Yale, Howard, and New York University. She has been awarded with an Obie(off Broadway theater award), a Los Angeles Time Book Prize for Poetry, and a Pushcart Prize. One of her most popular ”. I chose this person because her poetry gives me a sense of hope and pride in myself, and I wanted to share that experience with everyone. her work from her most popular work “for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow was enuff” was contributed mostly to the times of Harlem when you read the book and put into a picture the settings in which the character are from. But very well they relate to us girls in the world today. Here’s a piece performing by me called “now I love somebody more than” and it relates to us because there are times in our world were we want something and we don’t get it so we just rebel but in the end come face to face with the truth.