William Waring Cuney

William Waring Cuney (he/him) was born in Washington, DC, in 1906, with his twin brother Norris Wright. Their parents were Norris Wright Cuney II and Madge Louise Baker.

Waring Cuney’s work often addressed racial themes and incorporated musical forms such as ballads and blues. At 19, his poem “No Images” won first prize in the 1926 Opportunity magazine poetry contest. This poem remains a significant representation of the Harlem Renaissance, and has been widely anthologized and translated. Nina Simone also later adapted it into a song called “Images.”

In that same year, Waring Cuney published a poem in the historically significant Harlem Renaissance publication Fire!!. In the 1940s, his poems were recorded by Josh White on the album Southern Exposure.

Waring Cuney attended Howard University and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and studied music in Rome. He also studied at Lincoln University, which he would later convince fellow Harlem Renaissance poet, Langston Hughes, to attend.

The story of how the two poets met is notable. While riding a streetcar in Washington, DC, Waring Cuney was reading an issue of the Chicago Defender, which had run an announcement of Hughes’s new book, The Weary Blues, with a picture of Hughes. Looking up, Waring Cuney saw, almost miraculously, that the man himself was on the same streetcar. He approached Hughes to tell him he also wrote poetry and they struck up a conversation, which led to further opportunities for both poets.

During World War II, Waring Cuney served in the South Pacific as a technical sergeant, earning the Asiatic Pacific Theater Ribbon and three Bronze Stars. After the war, he returned to New York and lived in the Bronx. During this time, he published a number of shorter collections, pamphlets, and broadsides, including The Alley Cat Brushed His Wiskers [sic], Two Poems: Darkness Hides His Throne; [and], We Make Supplication (printed by N. Wright Cuney), and Women and Kitchens.

His first full-length poetry collection, Puzzles, was published in 1960 in the Netherlands by De Roos, and featured woodcuts by Ru van Rossem. Waring Cuney also coedited Lincoln University Poets: Centennial Anthology, 1854–1954 with Langston Hughes and Bruce McM. Wright for Fine Editions Press in 1954. His second collection, Storefront Church, was published in London in 1973 by Paul Breman.

Waring Cuney withdrew from public life in the early 1960s, but re-emerged in response to public criticism from John Oliver Killens. Cuney continued to write and publish until his death on June 30, 1976​.