Langston Hughes

Langston Hughes (James Mercer Langston Hughes, 1901–1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist born in Joplin, Missouri, and a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance. His work, which helped define a distinctly African American literary voice, includes major collections such as The Weary Blues, Fine Clothes to the Jew, and The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, as well as the novel Not Without Laughter and the autobiography The Big Sea. He was also an early innovator of jazz poetry, and his poems “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “Harlem,” and “Dream Variation” remain among his best-known works.

Hughes is the author of the short poem “My People,” originally written in the late 1920s to celebrate African American people. The poem was republished in 2009 as the picture book My People, pairing Hughes’s text with sepia-toned photographs by Charles R. Smith Jr. This edition received the Coretta Scott King Illustrator Award in 2010, honoring Smith’s illustrations accompanying Hughes’s poem.