John Edgar Wideman (2004)

Many of Wideman’s writings explore his personal interests and life. Surprisingly, this author of short stories, novels, a memoir and more once strived for a career in basketball. In the memoir Hoop Roots: Basketball, Race and Love (2001), Wideman used his love of the sport to present the complexities of black life. Wideman took a personal interest in Frantz Fanon and gave him a contemporary meaning in his latest work, Fanon (2008), which has been praised and described as part fiction and part biography and memoir.