Sarah E. Wright

Novelist, poet, essayist, and social activist, Sarah E. Wright (1928–2009) was born in the Village of Wetipquin, on the Eastern Shore of Jim Crow Maryland. She helped organize the First and the Second National Conference of Black Writers and the Congress of American Writers. She was the president of Pen & Brush, Inc., the oldest professional organization of women in the United States, and a member of the Harlem Writer's Guild, PEN, the Authors Guild, and the International Women's Writing Guild. Wright received numerous awards, including two MacDowell Colony fellowships for creative writing, the 1975 CAPS Award for Fiction, the 1976 Howard University Novelist-Poet Award, the Middle Atlantic Writers Association Award, and the Zora Neale Hurston Award.