May 30 - BlackFacts.com Black History Minute

BlackFacts.com: Learn/Teach/Create Black History

BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for May 30.

Countee Cullen was born.

He was an American poet, one of the finest of the Harlem Renaissance.

He won a citywide poetry contest as a schoolboy and saw his winning stanzas widely reprinted. At New York University he won the Witter Bynner Poetry Prize and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa.

Major American literary magazines accepted his poems regularly, and his first collection of poems, "Color" (1925), was published to critical acclaim before he had finished college.

Most notable among his other works are "Copper Sun" (1927), "The Ballad of the Brown Girl" (1928), and "The Medea and Some Poems" (1935). His novel "One Way to Heaven" (1932) depicts life in Harlem.

The Countee Cullen Library, a Harlem branch location of the New York Public Library, was named in his honor. In 2013, he was inducted into the New York Writers Hall of Fame.

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