- Born
- Died
- Essex Hemphill was born on April 16, 1957 in Chicago, Illinois, USA. He was a writer, known for Tongues Untied (1989), Black Is... Black Ain't (1994) and Black Nations/Queer Nations? (1995). He died on November 4, 1995 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.
- The anniversary of Essex Hemphill's death, December 10, 1995, is now honored as a National Day of Remembrance at NYC's LGBT Center.
- Though Essex Hemphill received national acclaim when his poetry appeared in the 1986 anthology, In the Life, a seminal collection of writings by Black gay men, the irony is that only months earlier he had been forced to self-publish his first two books of poetry: Earth Life in 1985 and Conditions in 1986.
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