About dudley randall academy of american poets
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Dudley Felker Randall was born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C. From his earliest childhood years, Randall was encouraged to read widely and to express his ideas on paper. Both of his parents were intellectuals. His mother, Ada (Bradley) Randall, was a teacher; his father, Arthur Randall, a Congregational minister.
Randall was only four years old when he wrote his first poem—a lyric for the tune “Maryland, My Maryland,” which was played at a band concert in the suburb of Baltimore where his family was staying at the time. The family moved to Detroit when Randall was nine. As Randall grew older, his father took him to lectures by such distinguished African-American visitors as author W. E. B. Du Bois. By the time Randall was a teenager, he not only had a deep appreciation of poetry but had developed his own style, which instinctively reflected that of the black writers he most admired.
During the war, Randall joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps and served in the Pacific. After his release from the U.S. Army in 1946, Randall finally was able to raise the
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Dudley Randall Biography
Sources
Books
Barksdale, Richard K., and Keneth Kinnamon, editors, Black Writers in America: A Comprehensive Anthology, Macmillan 1972.
Black Poets: The New Heroic Genre, Broadside Press, 1983.
Black Writers: A Selection of Sketches from Contemporary Authors, Gale Research, 1989.
Boyd, Melba Joyce. Wrestling With the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press, Columbia University Press, 2004.
Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 41: Afro-American Poets Since 1955, Gale Research, 1985.
King, Woodie, Jr., editor, The Forerunners: Black Poets in America, Howard University Press, 1981.
Miller, R. Baxter, editor, Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940–1960, University of Tennessee Press, 1986.
Periodicals
Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 17, no. 4, 1983, p. 157; February 1984.
Black Issues Book Review, November-December 2000, p. 14.
Black World, December 1971; September 1974.
Callaloo, Vol. 6, no. 1, 1983, p. 156.
Detroit Free Press Magazine, April 11, 1982.
Journal of American History, March 2005,
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Dudley Randall
American poet (1914– 2000)
Dudley Randall (January 14, 1914 – August 5, 2000) was an African-Americanpoet and poetry publisher from Detroit, Michigan.[1] He founded a pioneering publishing company called Broadside Press in 1965, which published many leading African-American writers, among them Melvin Tolson, Sonia Sanchez,[2]Audre Lorde, Gwendolyn Brooks,[2]Etheridge Knight, Margaret Walker, and others.[1]
Randall's most famous poem is "The Ballad of Birmingham," written in response to the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, in which four girls were killed.[3] Randall's poetry is characterized by simplicity, realism, and what one critic has called the "liberation aesthetic."[4] Other well-known poems of his include "A Poet is not a Jukebox", "Booker T. and W.E.B.", and "The Profile on the Pillow".
Life
Dudley Randall was born on January 14, 1914, in Washington, D.C.,[5] the son of Arthur George Clyde (a Congregational Minister) and Ada Viola (
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