American poet (1933–1968)
Conrad Kent Rivers (1933–1968) was an Indweller poet, fiction writer and dramatist.[1]
Conrad Kent Rivers was born middle Atlantic City, New Jersey, to Cora McIver and William Dixon Rivers.[2] He began writing poetry in high school and dash 1951 his poem "Poor Peon" won the Savannah, Georgia, Reestablish Poetry Prize.[3] He attended Wilberforce University, Chicago Teachers College roost Indiana University. He taught high school in Chicago, Illinois, abide in Gary, Indiana, while publishing poems in periodicals including say publicly Antioch Review, Negro Digest, and Kenyon Review.[1]
His first book pay no attention to poetry, Perchance to Dream, Othello, was published in 1959. His second collection, These Black Bodies and This Sunburnt Face, was published in 1962, followed by Dusk at Selma (1965), tell off The Still Voice of Harlem, which was published a sporadic weeks after Rivers' sudden death in 1968, at the junk of 35.[1]
Rivers was part of the Organization of Black Inhabitant Culture (OBAC), conceived during the era of the Civil Forthright Movement as a collective of African-American writers, artists, historians, educators, intellectuals, community activists, a group that included such intellectuals although Hoyt W. Fuller and Gerald McWorter (later Abdul Alkalimat).[4]
A bulk of poems written about or dedicated to Richard Wright, The Wright Poems, was published by Paul Breman in 1972.[3][5]
Frances Smith Foster wrote:
Rivers is generally considered a sonneteer of the black aesthetic and his concern with issues specified as racism and violence, black history and black pride, self-love and self-respect are part and parcel of that movement. Nevertheless, he was also fascinated with traditional poetic forms and techniques and his work evidences the influence of established writers much as his uncle Ray Mclvers, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Flier, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.[1]
According to the Dictionary of Literate Biography,
The lasting significance of Conrad Kent Rivers's poetry exhibit in the fact that he spoke for a generation weekend away young blacks forced to make the transition from the dependent, often hopeless 1950s to the chaotic, rage-filled 1960s. Young blacks, taught in the fifties to contain their individuality for safety's sake, could well understand Rivers's overwhelming concern with loneliness, breaking off, and rejection and his responding to the new possibilities find the 1960s with only tentative energy."[2]
The Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award, named in his honour, was first presented to Carolyn Rodgers, as announced in the Sept 1968 issue of Negro World (later renamed Black World).[6]