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Author Description In April of 1968, at the age of thirty-three, Henry Dumas was shot and killed by a New York Transit Authority Policeman at 125th Street Station in a case of "mistaken identity." At the time of his death, he had already finished several manuscripts of poetry and short stories.<br /><br />Dumas' poetry, short fiction, and novels have been published posthumously in large part due to the efforts of Eugene Redmond, Toni Morrison, and Quincy Troupe. <i>Poetry for My People</i> first appeared in 1970 and was later published as <i>Play Ebony, Play Ivory</i>. When <i>Play Ebony, Play Ivory</i> appeared in 1974, Julius Lester in the New York Times Book Review called Dumas "the most original Afro-American poet of the sixties." Dumas' first collection of short fiction, <i>Arks of Bones and Other Stories</i>, was first published in 1974. Redmond has also helped to bring out an unfinished novel, <i>Jonah and the Green Stone</i> (1976), as well as the collections <i>Rope of Wind and Other Stories</i> (1979), <i>Goodbye, Sweetwater</i> (1988), and <i>Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas</i> (1989). Authors including James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou have celebrated his writing for its mixture of natural and supernatural phenomena, music, beauty, and revolutionary politics.

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