Arna Bontemps

Arnaud "Arna" Wendell Bontemps (October 13, 1902 – June 4, 1973) was an American poet, novelist and librarian, and a noted member of the Harlem Renaissance.

Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana, into a Louisiana Creole family. His father, Paul Bismark Bontemps, worked as a bricklayer; his mother, Maria Carolina Pembroke, as a schoolteacher. When he was three years old, his family moved to Los Angeles, California in the Great Migration of blacks out of the South and into cities of the North, Midwest and West. They settled in what became known as the Watts district.

After attending public schools, Bontemps attended Pacific Union College in Angwin, California, where he graduated in 1923. He majored in English and minored in history, and he was also a member of the Omega Psi Phi fraternity.

Along with many other West Coast Intellectuals, Bontemps was drawn to New York during the Harlem Renaissance. After graduation, he moved to New York to teach at the Harlem Academy in 1924. While he was teaching, Bontemps began to publish poetry. In both 1926 and 1927, he received the Alexander Pushkin Prize of Opportunity, a National Urban League published journal. And in 1926 he won the Crisis Poetry Prize, which was an official journal of the NAACP.

In New York, Bontemps met many lifelong friends including Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay and Jean Toomer.Hughes became a role model, collaborator, and dear friend to Bontemps.

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