Conrad Kent Rivers

Conrad Kent Rivers was born on October 15, 1933, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the son of Cora McIver and William Dixon Rivers. He came to poetry early: while still a student he won the Savannah, Georgia, State Poetry Prize in 1951 for his poem "Poor Peon," an omen of the voice that would follow.

He studied at Wilberforce University, Chicago Teachers College, and Indiana University, then earned his living as a high-school teacher in Chicago and in Gary, Indiana. All the while he wrote, placing poems in the Antioch Review, the Kenyon Review, Negro Digest, and other journals. His first collection, Perchance to Dream, Othello, appeared in 1959, followed by These Black Bodies and This Sunburnt Face (1962), Dusk at Selma (1965), and The Still Voice of Harlem, published just weeks after his death.

In Chicago, Rivers stood among the founders of the Black Arts Movement as part of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), alongside figures such as Hoyt W. Fuller and Gerald McWorter. His verse carried the movement's concerns—racism and violence, Black history and Black pride, self-love and self-respect—and his sequence honoring Richard Wright was gathered posthumously as The Wright Poems (1972), introduced by Ronald L. Fair.

Conrad Kent Rivers died in 1968, only thirty-four years old, his gift cut short. The Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award, first given to the poet Carolyn Rodgers, carries his name forward. May his mourning songs and his pride endure, an honored voice of Harlem and of Chicago, remembered.