David Henderson

David Henderson, a poet, biographer, and a cofounder of the Umbra Poets Workshop, was born in Harlem, New York, on September 19, 1942. Henderson attended Bronx Community College, Hunter College, and The New School.

Central to the Black Arts Movement in the 1960s, Umbra was an influential collective of Black poets and writers, including Ishmael Reed, Calvin Hernton, Askia Touré, Norman Pritchard, Lorenzo Thomas and future Gathering of the Tribes founder Steve Cannon, who met in New York City’s Lower East Side from 1962 to 1965 to conduct readings and discuss political writing.

Umbra Poets Workshop established Umbra in 1963, a journal which stated in its first issue: “Umbra is not another haphazard ‘little literary’ publication. Umbra has a defined orientation: (1) the experience of being Negro, especially in America; and (2) that quality of human awareness often termed ‘social consciousness.’”

After moving to the West Coast in 1972, Henderson taught at the University Without Walls and then at both the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California San Diego where he was involved with anti-draft protest movements during the Vietnam War. Through the 1980s and 1990s, Henderson was an esteemed lecturer at The New School, Long Island University, The Poetry Project, and Naropa University where he presented with Allen Ginsberg.

Henderson’s books include Neo-California (North Atlantic Books, 1998) and De Mayor of Harlem (E. P. Dutton, 1970). His first poetry collection, Felix of the Silent Forest, was published by Diane di Prima for Poets Press in 1967 with an introduction by Amiri Baraka.

Baraka wrote, “David Henderson’s poetry is the world echo, with the strength and if you are conscious, beauty of the place tone … These are local epics with the breadth that the emotional consciousness of a culture can make.”

Henderson later wrote the biography of Jimi Hendrix, ’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Atria Books, 2009). He lives in New York City.