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One of Book Authority's 8 New African-American and Black Biography Books Shaping 2025 

In the 1960s, Charles Wright’s (1932–2008) star was on the rise. After dropping out of high school and serving in the Korean War, the young Black writer landed in New York, where he was mentored by Norman Mailer, signed a book deal with a leading publisher, and was celebrated by the likes of Langston Hughes and James Baldwin.

Over the decades to follow, Wright would lead a peripatetic and at times precarious life, moving between Tangier, Veracruz, Paris, and New York, penning a regular column for the Village Voice, living off the goodwill of his friends, and battling addiction and, later, mental health issues. As W. Lawrence Hogue shows, Wright’s innovative fiction stands apart, offering a different vision of outcast Black Americans in the postwar era and using satire to bring agency and humanity to working-class characters. This critical biography—the first devoted to Wright’s significant but largely forgotten story—brings new attention to the writer’s impressive body of work, in the context of a wild, but troubled, life.

Dennis Cooper is one of the most inventive and prolific artists of our time. Working in a variety of forms and media since he first exploded onto the scene in the early 1970s, he has been a punk poet, a queercore novelist, a transgressive blogger, an indie filmmaker—each successive incarnation more ingenious and surprising than the last. Cooper’s unflinching determination to probe the obscure, often violent recesses of the human psyche have seen him compared with literary outlaws like Rimbaud, Genet, and the Marquis de Sade.

In this, the first book-length study of Cooper’s life and work, Diarmuid Hester shows that such comparisons hardly scratch the surface. A lively retrospective appraisal of Cooper’s fifty-year career, Wrong tracks the emergence of Cooper’s singular style alongside his participation in a number of American subcultural movements like New York School poetry, punk rock, and radical queercore music and zines. Using extensive archival research, close readings of texts, and new interviews with Cooper and his contemporaries, Hester weaves a complex and often thrilling biographical narrative that attests to Cooper’s status as a leading figure of the American post­–War avant-garde.

Historian and novelist Song WooHye chronicles the life of Yun Dong-ju (1917-1945), one of the most beloved and important poets in the modern Korean literary canon, widely considered Korea's "National Poet". Beginning with the history of the North Gando region (now Yanbian, China), where Yun was born, and ending with facts behind the publication of his only and posthumous poetry collection, Sky, Wind, Star, and Poem, this critical biography elucidates who Yun Dong-ju really was, with factual descriptions of the bleak and turbulent period of Japan’s colonization of Korea.
 
While first working on the book in the 1980s, Song had interviewed the poet’s surviving relatives and friends, most of whom have since passed away. Without her interviews, these important first-hand accounts would have been lost. Song had an added advantage of an “insider,” as she is a niece of Song Mong-gyu, who was the poet’s first cousin and inseparable friend for life. Incorporating newly discovered materials and using interviews with the beloved poet's family and friends, this biography is the most comprehensive, definitive biography of Yun Dong-ju to date, now available in English for the first time.
 

This book is published with the support of the Literature Translation Institute of Korea (LTI Korea).