Kevin Brown (author)
Encyclopedia
Kevin Brown is a biographer, essayist and translator who has authored or contributed to three books.

Kevin Brown has published brief lives of Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...

 and Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...

. He was a contributing editor to The New York Public Library African American Desk Reference

Since 1978, many of Brown's essays, articles and reviews on the visual arts, cinema, dance, literature, music and politics have appeared in Afterimage, the American Book Review
American Book Review
The American Book Review is a nonprofit, internationally distributed publication that appears six times a year. ABR specializes in reviews of frequently neglected published works of fiction, poetry, and literary and cultural criticism from small, regional, university, ethnic, avant-garde, and...

, American Visions, the Chicago Review
Chicago Review
The Chicago Review is a literary magazine published four times per year in the Humanities Division at the University of Chicago. It was founded in 1946. Three stories published in the Chicago Review have won the O. Henry Prize...

, the Kansas City Star, Kirkus, the London Times Literary Supplement, The Nation
The Nation
The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...

, New York Newsday, the Oakland Tribune, the Threepenny Review and the Washington Post Bookworld, among others.

Brown's 2005 translation into Spanish of Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

's little known essay "Reviewing" appeared in the Iowa University journal of literary translation eXchanges. His profile of translator Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College.-Life and career:Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré...

 was published in 2006 by the University of Delaware
University of Delaware
The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...

's Review of Latin American Studies.

Predecessors

Brown's mother, Duan Nimmons, was born (1940) in New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

, where her family had been active in the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...

 of the 1920s and early 1930s. His maternal great-grandmother was Ida Mae Roberson (later, Ida Cullen-Cooper), widow of Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen was an American poet who was popular during the Harlem Renaissance.- Biography :Cullen was an American poet and a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance. This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African...

. Countee Cullen was a teacher at Frederick Douglass Junior High school, where James Baldwin
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist and civil rights activist.James Baldwin may also refer to:-Writers:*James Baldwin , American educator, writer and administrator...

 was among his students. Prior to his marriage to Ida Mae Roberson, Countee Cullen had briefly been the son-in-law of W.E.B. Du Bois
W.E.B. Du Bois
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois attended Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate...

.

Early life

Kevin Brown was born in Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri
Kansas City, Missouri is the largest city in the U.S. state of Missouri and is the anchor city of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area, the second largest metropolitan area in Missouri. It encompasses in parts of Jackson, Clay, Cass, and Platte counties...

 in 1960. Before primary school, he traveled around Western Europe and North Africa with his father, John Brown, a writer and running back with the late 1950s Iowa Hawkeyes
Iowa Hawkeyes
The Iowa Hawkeyes are the athletics teams that represent the University of Iowa in Iowa City, Iowa, United States. The Hawkeyes have varsity teams in 24 sports, 11 for men and 13 for women. The teams participate in Division I of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and are members of the...

 football team that played against The University of California
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 in the 1959 Rose Bowl
Rose Bowl Game
The Rose Bowl is an annual American college football bowl game, usually played on January 1 at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, California. When New Year's Day falls on a Sunday, the game is played on Monday, January 2...

. In the mid 1960s, John Brown met William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...

, Ted Joans
Ted Joans
Theodore "Ted" Joans was an American trumpeter, jazz poet and painter.Joans was born in Cairo, Illinois, but not on a riverboat as had been claimed. He earned a degree in fine arts from Indiana University. He later associated with writers of the Beat Generation in Greenwich Village and San Francisco...

 and other writers associated with the Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...

 in Tangier
Tangier
Tangier, also Tangiers is a city in northern Morocco with a population of about 700,000 . It lies on the North African coast at the western entrance to the Strait of Gibraltar where the Mediterranean meets the Atlantic Ocean off Cape Spartel...

, Morocco. In the late 60s, Kevin Brown lived in the Haight Ashbury district of San Francisco, attending Twin Peaks Elementary School. In the early 1970s, he lived in the Bay Area peninsula, in San Mateo
San Mateo, California
San Mateo is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area. With a population of approximately 100,000 , it is one of the larger suburbs on the San Francisco Peninsula, located between Burlingame to the north, Foster City to the east, Belmont to the south,...

 and Santa Clara
Santa Clara, California
Santa Clara , founded in 1777 and incorporated in 1852, is a city in Santa Clara County, in the U.S. state of California. The city is the site of the eighth of 21 California missions, Mission Santa Clara de Asís, and was named after the mission. The Mission and Mission Gardens are located on the...

 counties, attending Ralston Middle School in Belmont, California
Belmont, California
Belmont is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States. It is in the San Francisco Bay Area, located half-way down the San Francisco Peninsula between San Mateo and San Carlos. It was originally part of the Rancho de las Pulgas, for which one of its main roads, the Alameda de las Pulgas,...

, as well as Rancho Junior High and Samuel Ayer High School in Milpitas, California
Milpitas, California
Milpitas is a city in Santa Clara County, California. It is a suburb of the major city of San Jose, California. It is located with San Jose to its south and Fremont to its north, at the eastern end of State Route 237 and generally between Interstates 680 and 880 which run roughly north/south...

, a suburb of San Jose
San Jose, California
San Jose is the third-largest city in California, the tenth-largest in the U.S., and the county seat of Santa Clara County which is located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay...

. He graduated from Southeast High School in Kansas City, Missouri (1977). From 1978-1979, he lived in St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis is an independent city on the eastern border of Missouri, United States. With a population of 319,294, it was the 58th-largest U.S. city at the 2010 U.S. Census. The Greater St...

, reading, writing, waiting tables.

Apprenticeship

From 1980-1984, in San Francisco, Brown studied Latin and Greek with a private tutor, reading widely in the works of the ancients and the French as well as contemporary post-war writers like Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal
Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...

. He began publishing book reviews on writers like Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston
Zora Neale Hurston was an American folklorist, anthropologist, and author during the time of the Harlem Renaissance...

, Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Pepys FRS, MP, JP, was an English naval administrator and Member of Parliament who is now most famous for the diary he kept for a decade while still a relatively young man...

 and Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf
Adeline Virginia Woolf was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century....

 in newspapers such as the Oakland Tribune as well as longer essays on Spanish cinema
Cinema of Spain
The art of motion-picture making within the nation of Spain or by Spanish filmmakers abroad is collectively known as Spanish Cinema.In recent years, Spanish cinema has achieved high marks of recognition as a result of its creative and technical excellence...

 and James Baldwin
James Baldwin
James Baldwin was an American novelist, essayist and civil rights activist.James Baldwin may also refer to:-Writers:*James Baldwin , American educator, writer and administrator...

 in the Threepenny Review

Higher Education

In 1985, Brown moved to New York, attending the Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 School of General Studies for one year before transferring to the City University of New York
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...

. There, he double-majored in Spanish as well as Translating & Interpreting, completing his undergraduate degree in the CUNY Baccalaureate Program for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies, headquartered at the Graduate Center. He studied with literary translator Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College.-Life and career:Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré...

, among others.

Marriage and Family Ties

Brown lived in New York for 22 years, from 1985 to 2007, during which time he married and had a son. He returned to California in 2007, and currently lives in San Diego.

Selected Publications

In 1985, Brown worked as an editorial assistant in the publishing industry in New York, and contributed to the London Times Literary Supplement. From 1987-1989, Brown was a regular contributor to Kirkus, where he published book reviews on subjects as various as Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

, African-American writers, 20th century American poetry, Anglo-American common law, Australian-New Zealand writers, French history and literature, the Harlem Renaissance
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, it was known as the "New Negro Movement", named after the 1925 anthology by Alain Locke...

, music, photography, politics. During the 1990s, he traveled in Central America and Eastern Europe, contributed to the American Book Review, American Visions and New York Newsday, and contracted to begin work on a series of biographies on Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden
Romare Bearden was an African American artist and writer. He worked in several media including cartoons, oils, and collage.-Education:...

, Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...

 and Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen
Countee Cullen was an American poet who was popular during the Harlem Renaissance.- Biography :Cullen was an American poet and a leading figure with Langston Hughes in the Harlem Renaissance. This 1920s artistic movement produced the first large body of work in the United States written by African...

.

Books

  • Romare Bearden: Artist
  • Malcolm X:His Life and Legacy


Commissioned in 1993, just after the release of Spike Lee
Spike Lee
Shelton Jackson "Spike" Lee is an American film director, producer, writer, and actor. His production company, 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks, has produced over 35 films since 1983....

's movie on the same subject, Brown's second book attempts to chronicle the rise and fall of Malcolm X as well as that of rival leader Martin Luther King against the backdrop of the civil rights and black nationalist movements.

Profiles and Interviews

At Queens College and other campuses throughout the 23-college CUNY system, Kevin Brown studied both literary as well as technical translation with Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa
Gregory Rabassa is a renowned literary translator from Spanish and Portuguese to English who currently teaches at Queens College.-Life and career:Rabassa was born in Yonkers, New York, U.S., into a family headed by a Cuban émigré...

 and other faculty from Spain and Latin America. His profile-interview of Rabassa appeared in the University of Delaware
University of Delaware
The university is organized into seven colleges:* College of Agriculture and Natural Resources* College of Arts and Sciences* Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics* College of Earth, Ocean and Environment* College of Education and Human Development...

's Review of Latin American Studies.

Biographies

  • Romare Bearden: Artist. New York: Chelsea House, 1994.
  • Malcolm X: His Life and Legacy. Brookfield, CT: Millbrook Press, 1995.

Selected Essays, articles & reviews

  • "Images of the Spirit". (On Mexican Photographer Graciela Iturbide
    Graciela Iturbide
    - Biography :Graciela Iturbide was born in Mexico in 1942, the eldest of thirteen children. She then married the architect Manuel Rocha Díaz in 1962 and had three children over the next eight years. Iturbide's six year old daughter died in 1970; after this death she turned to photography...

    ) Afterimage, Vol. 34.6 (May/June 2007), pp. 33–34.
  • "After the Renaissance: The Life of W.E.B. Du Bois
    W.E.B. Du Bois
    William Edward Burghardt Du Bois was an American sociologist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, and editor. Born in Massachusetts, Du Bois attended Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate...

    ". The Nation, 11 December 2000, pp. 52–57.

Contributing Editor

  • Chapter 14: Music The New York Public Library African American Desk Reference

Selected Translations

  • Virginia Woolf, "Reviewing" (1939). eXchanges: a Journal of Literary Translation ("Saints and Sinners" Issue, Winter 2006)
  • Utah State University Digital Library, "Latino/a Voices Project": Ana Cecilia Barragán interview July 27, 2007.
  • Utah State University Digital Library, "Latino/a Voices Project" : Jorge Rodas interview July 13, 2007.

As Interviewer

  • "Gregory Rabassa: An Interview". Delaware Review of Latin American Studies, Vol. 7 No. 2 December 30, 2006.

As Interviewee

  • "Blueprint for Writing: An Interview with Kevin Brown". Harlem Arts Journal, Spring 2000.
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