DC Noir 2: The Classics

About the contributors

Rhozier “Roach” Brown, while serving a life sentence for murder, founded the Inner Voices, a drama troupe that was allowed out of prison more than eight hundred times to perform their brand of social drama. Largely as a result of the group’s success, President Gerald Ford commuted Brown’s sentence to immediate parole. The play Group Work was nominated for three television Emmy Awards and won Best Social Film at the New York Film Festival. A television documentary titled Roach was created about his life story. Later, he worked as a special assistant to Mayor Marion Barry for offender affairs and has been active in endeavors dealing with prisoners and former prisoners, both as the director of community-based programs and as a political activist. Brown played a key role in getting legislation passed that gave ex-offenders the right to vote in D.C. elections. He has also worked as a television and film producer.

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was among the first African American poets to garner national eminence in the U.S., gaining popular recognition for his collection Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896). Although born in Ohio, Dunbar attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he lived in LeDroit Park. Shortly after his marriage to fellow poet Alice Ruth Moore, Dunbar took a job at the Library of Congress. His time there was short-lived, however, as he blamed the library’s dust for his worsening tuberculosis. Dunbar’s other poetry collections include Oak and Ivy (1893) and Majors and Minors (1895), and his poems and short stories were published in Harper’s Weekly, the Sunday Evening Post, the Denver Post, and Current Literature. What was originally established as the first high school for African American children in Washington, D.C. was renamed in honor of Paul Laurence Dunbar and continues to carry his name after a recent relocation to the Northwest quadrant of the city.

Marita Golden is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent novel, After, was named a 2007 Outstanding Work of Fiction by the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is president emeritus of the Hurston/Wright Foundation.

James Grady is a former investigative reporter and author of the best-selling novel Six Days of the Condor. He has spent his career writing from Washington, D.C., publishing more than a dozen novels and numerous short stories — including a selection in the original D.C. Noir. Also active in movie and TV writing, Grady’s literary work has won two Regardies Short Fiction awards, garnered an Edgar nomination, and received Italy’s Raymond Chandler Medal, Japan’s Baka-Misu Award, and France’s Grand Prix du Roman Noir.

Elizabeth Hand is the multiple award — winning author of nine novels and three collections of short fiction. Since 1988, she has been a regular contributor to the Washington Post Book World, the Village Voice, and DownEast Magazine, among other publications. She lives on the coast of Maine.

Langston Hughes (1902–1967), most notably recognized as a founder of the cultural movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, was a poet, short story writer, and playwright. After traveling throughout Africa and Europe as a young man, Hughes moved to Washington, D.C. for a period of time in the 1920s, where he lived at the 12th Street YMCA. There he was part of the blossoming literary scene, publishing poetry in the Howard University-associated journals The Crisis and The New Negro. Influential in his rhythmic, jazzlike writing style, his other works include The Weary Blues (1926), Not Without Laughter (1930), I Wonder As I Wander (195), Tambourines to Glory (1958), and a series of books involving the character Simple.

Edward P. Jones is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Born in 1951, Jones was raised in Washington, D.C., where he lived until attending Holy Cross and later the University of Virginia, earning his MFA. He won the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lannan Foundation grant for his first book, Lost in the City (1992), a collection of short stories about working-class African Americans living in D.C. His other works include The Known World (2003) and All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006). Jones once again resides in D.C., where he continues to write.

Ward Just was a war correspondent in Cyprus for Newsweek and a key reporter for the Washington Post during the Vietnam War. Among his impressive catalog of fifteen novels, four short story collections, and one play, Just’s novel An Unfinished Season (2004) was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, and Jack Gance (1989) won the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award for Fiction. Just’s work often revolves around Washington, D.C., highlighting the influence and repercussions of national politics and policymaking on American citizens.

Julian Mayfield (1928–1984) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, actor, and political activist. In 1962, he lived in Ghana and was a speechwriter for President Kwame Nkrumah and editor of the African Review. He was the acknowledged leader of the African American community that settled in Ghana to assist Nkrumah in his dream to unite Africa. In the early 1970s, Mayfield lived in Guyana, South America, assisting President Forbes Burnham in the establishment of a national service to help feed, clothe, and house its citizens. Documentation of his colorful career in the arts and politics can be found at New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

Julian Mazor was born in Baltimore in 1929 and grew up in Washington, D.C. He has also lived in New York, London, and Ireland. He is a graduate of Indiana University and Yale Law School and served in the air force. His two short fiction collections, Washington and Baltimore and Friend of Mankind and Other Stories, include stories that originally appeared in the New Yorker.

Larry Neal’s (1937–1981) early work, including “The Negro in the Theatre” (1964), “Cultural Front” (1965), and “The Black Arts Movement” (1968), helped define the Black Power era. Working together with Amiri Baraka to open the Black Arts Repertory Theatre/School, Neal continued to publish his essays and poems in publications such as Drama Critique, Black Theatre, Negro Digest, Performance, and Liberator. He taught for a time at Howard University in D.C.; Neal’s story in this collection describes — from a female point of view — the four-day student protest and campus takeover of 1968. Howard was the first university to be successfully closed down by student activism and would serve as the model for the Columbia University shutdown later that year.

George Pelecanos is an independent film producer, the recipient of numerous international writing awards, a producer and an Emmy-nominated writer on the HBO series The Wire, and the author of fifteen novels set in and around Washington, D.C. He is the editor of the best-selling first volume of D.C. Noir.

Benjamin M. Schutz (1949–2008) was the author of the acclaimed psychological thriller The Mongol Reply, as well as previous novels and short stories featuring private eye Leo Haggerty. His fiction has won both Shamus and Edgar awards. He was a forensic psychologist who lived in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C.

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) worked for over twenty years as a reporter, foreign correspondent, and political strategist. He turned to writing at the age of forty and produced his first novel, The Cold War Swap (1967), which won an Edgar Award, in just six weeks. Writing twenty-five novels over the course of his twenty-nine year career, often under the pseudonym Oliver Bleeck, Thomas’s works include Chinaman’s Chance (1978), Out on the Rim (1987), and Voodoo Ltd. (1992). In 2002, he received the first Gumshoe Award for Lifetime Achievement.

Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in Washington, D.C. An African American whose maternal grandparents both had Caucasian fathers, he resisted racial classification even from childhood, switching between an all-black school in D.C. to an all-white school in New Rochelle, New York, then back again. Although he studied at the University of Wisconsin, the Massachusetts College of Agriculture, the American College of Physical Training in Chicago, City College in New York, and New York University, he never received a degree. Among his most prominent works, Cane (1923) is considered to be a crucial text of the Harlem Renaissance and the Lost Generation; the novel explores the societal position of African Americans in the South during the early 1900s.

Richard Wright (1908–1960) was born to a sharecropper and a school teacher in Mississippi. He was the author of several novels, short stories, and nonfiction works that are among the most powerful and controversial pieces of American writing. A major participant in the Harlem Renaissance, Wright helped redefine race relations in the twentieth century. His first story, “The Voodoo of Hell’s Half Acre,” was published in 1924 in the Southern Register. Wrights other works include Uncle Toms Children (1938), Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945), The Outsider (1953), Eight Men (1961), and Haiku: This Other World (1998). In 1940, Native Son became the first national best seller by a black writer in American history.