James Baldwin (1924–1987) was a novelist, essayist, playwright, poet, and social critic, and one of America’s foremost writers. His essays, such as “Notes of a Native Son,” explore palpable yet unspoken intricacies of racial, sexual, and class distinctions in Western societies, most notably in mid-twentieth-century America. A Harlem, New York, native, he primarily made his home in the south of France. He is the author of the novels Go Tell It on the Mountain and Giovanni’s Room, and of the poetry collection Jimmy’s Blues.

Rich Blint is the 2016-2017 Scholar-in-Residence in the MFA Program in Performance + Performance Studies in the Department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is co-editor of a special issue of African American Review on James Baldwin; contributing editor of The James Baldwin Review; and provided the introduction and notes for the eBook, Baldwin for Our Times: Writings from James Baldwin for an Age of Sorrow and Struggle. He is presently at work on his monograph, A Radical Interiority: James Baldwin and the Personified Self in Modern American Culture. He earned his Ph.D. in American Studies at New York University, and has held faculty, research, and administrative appointments at Columbia University, Barnard College, Hunter College, and the Murphy Institute at the Graduate and University Center, CUNY. He has received fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon and Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundations, among others.