Arnold Rampersad

Critic and biographer Arnold Rampersad grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. He earned a BA and an MA from Bowling Green State University. In 1973 he earned a PhD from Harvard University, where he wrote a dissertation on W.E.B. DuBois, which was later published as The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. DuBois (1976). He is the author many other books, including Ralph Ellison: A Biography (2007); Jackie Robinson: A Biography (1997); Days of Grace: A Memoir (1993), co-authored with Arthur Ashe; and the two-volume The Life of Langston Hughes (1986 and 1988), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. He is also editor of The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994). Rampersad’s honors include a Lifetime Achievement Prize from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards and fellowships from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Rockefeller Foundation. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. He has taught at Rutgers University, Columbia University, and Princeton University, and he is the Sarah Hart Kimball Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at Stanford University.