Amiri Baraka, born Everett Leroy Jones, was an American writer of poetry, drama, fiction, and music criticism who died in 2014. He is best known for Blues People: Negro Music in White America, a study of how the blues and jazz developed from slavery through the modern era, and for the two plays in Dutchman & The Slave. He taught at the University at Buffalo and Stony Brook University, and received the PEN/Beyond Margins Award in 2008 for Tales of the Out and the Gone.
