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William Demby was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on December 25, 1922, and attended college in Clarksburg, West Virginia, before enlisting in World War II and serving in Italy. He graduated from Fisk University in 1947 then moved abroad to Rome, where he spent the next two decades working as a novelist, journalist, and script translator and screenwriter for the Italian cinema. In the late 1960s, Demby joined the faculty at The College of Staten Island, dividing his time between the United States and Italy. His works include Beetlecreek, The Catacombs, Love Story Black, and King Comus. In 2006, he was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Lifetime Achievement. He died in Sag Harbor, New York, in 2013. Ishmael Reed is the author of over twenty-five books and plays, including Mumbo Jumbo and Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down. He is also a publisher, television producer, songwriter, radio and television commentator, lecturer, and has long been devoted to exploring an alternative black aesthetic- the trickster tradition, or Neo-Hoodooism. He has received the MacArthur Fellowship, the Los Angeles Times Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award. Reed has been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and is the only person to be nominated for the National Book Award in two categories in the same year.
“Thoroughly engaging. . . . Witty and sensible.” —Kirkus Reviews “[Demby is] a true artist.” —Arna Bontemps, author of Black Thunder “One of the great novelists of the last 100 years.”—Ishmael Reed, author of Mumbo Jumbo
