Name Calvin Baker | Role Writer | |
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Education University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, Amherst College Books Naming the new world, Once Two Heroes, Grace, Dominion | ||
Calvin baker 4 university of virginia
Calvin Baker (born in Chicago) is an American novelist, essayist, editor, and futurist who has chronicled the African American experience from the Colonial era to the present, centering the Black voice and perspective within the context of multicultural, global history. Among his concerns are American identity, cosmopolitanism, race, post-colonialism, the collapse of modernism, geography, and science. His work is often praised for its expansiveness and richness of language.
His first novel, Naming the New World, was sold to A Wyatt Books for St. Martin's Press when he was 23. The novel begins in Africa before contact with Europe and ends in recent America. The narrative employs postmodern techniques to unify a single consciousness across time. It was hailed by numerous publications, including Time Magazine, as the beginning of a major new voice in American letters.
His second novel, Once Two Heroes, employs a dual narrative structure, one white, one black, to explore the midcentury connection between America and Europe and 20th century violence through the prism of World War II and the American phenomenon of racial lynching.
His third novel, Dominion, is concerned with the promise and potentialities of pre-Revolutionary America, the birth of a racial caste system, and the ghost of loss that haunted the early settlers both black and white.
His most recent novel, Grace, is concerned with the Black Atlantic, the intersection of identity and geography, the interplay of logical and emotional systems, the tension between public and private selves, and possibilities for unity.
Esquire named him one of the best young writers in America in 2005. Dominion was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award as well as one of New York Newsday′s Best Books of the Year. His work has been widely acclaimed by critics as well as writers as diverse as Joseph O'Neill, Junot Diaz, Jeffrey Renard Allen, Francisco Goldman, Dale Peck, Maud Newton, and Hannah Tinti. Peck, widely known for his critical takedowns, has called Baker one of his favorite living writers, saying of Grace, "He works in a rarefied strain of literature whose practitioners include Faulkner, Morrison, Calvino and Cormac McCarthy." Newton has praised Baker's Dominion for "richness of language that recalls the King James."
Baker recently teamed with Peck and publisher John Oakes to relaunch the Evergreen Review, the literary journal founded by Barney Rosset, which was influential in bringing attention to writers such as Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Vladimir Nabokov, Edward Albee, and Leroi Jones.
Early in his career he worked as a journalist at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Time Inc., and The Village Voice. He also published a Kindle Single with Amazon entitled Notes for a Spanish Odyssey about race and migration in Europe.
Baker attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools and graduated from Amherst College, where he received his degree in English with highest honors in the major. He has taught in the English Department at Yale, Columbia University’s MFA Program, and the American Studies Department at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Baker is also a technology entrepreneur—notably as co-founder of the digital content platform ScrollMotion, with Josh Koppel and John Lema. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.