Arna Bontemps made an indelible impact on African American folklore studies, literature, history, and cultural expression as a poet, author, editor, and librarian.

Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, Arnaud (Arna) Wendell Bontemps, son of a stonemason turned Seventh Day Adventist lay minister and a schoolteacher, was raised in California from the age of three. He earned an AB degree (a Bachelor of Arts equivalent) from Pacific Union College in 1923. The next year he took a teaching position in New York City where he was drawn into the creative activity of the Harlem Renaissance. He soon met and married his wife Alberta and befriended and developed lifelong relationships with fellow writers, including Countee Cullen, W. E. B. DuBois, Zora Neale Hurston, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, and Langston Hughes, with whom he frequently collaborated. 

In the early 1930s, as the Great Depression began and dispersed the literary circles of the Harlem Renaissance, Bontemps took a teaching post in Huntsville, Alabama, then another one in Chicago, Illinois. An accomplished writer by the time he landed in Chicago, Bontemps became an editor under the Works Progress Administrations’ Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). During Bontemps’ time on the FWP, he reviewed, edited, and organized field notes and interviews for The Negro of Illinois project with fellow editor and future collaborator, Jack Conroy. Their work on the FWP led to a coauthored historical account of Great Migration, They Seek A City (1945). 

After he earned a Master of Library Science degree from the University of Chicago in 1943, Bontemps became the head librarian at Fisk University in Nashville, where he remained until his retirement. Throughout his career he received numerous awards, including two Pushkin Prizes for Poetry, a Crisis Poetry Prize, and creative writing fellowships from Rosenwald Fund and Guggenheim Foundation. 
Collaborating with friends and colleagues along the way, Bontemps steadfastly captured, cataloged, and shared Black cultural expression, heralding its diasporic folklife, folk arts, and creativity in fiction, stage plays, biographies, and anthologies. In a career spanning from the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s to the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, Bontemps authored more than 20 books, including two novels and several acclaimed children’s books. Bontemps also wrote scholarly articles on the Harlem Renaissance and collaborated on major anthologies of Black culture. Among his publications relevant for folklore are:

Coedited with Langston Hughes. The Book of Negro Folklore (1958)

Dolinar, Brian, ed.  The Negro in Illinois: The WPA Papers (2013)

Cheryl T. Schiele