Waring Cuney

William Waring Cuney was born in Washington, D.C., and educated at Howard University, Lincoln University (where he was a classmate of Langston Hughes), and the New England Conservatory of Music. Cuney later studied music in Rome and at Columbia University before focusing on writing.

Cuney published poems in the short-lived Harlem Renaissance-era magazine Fire!! and in Countee Cullen’s anthology Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927). Cuney’s poem “No Images,” which Nina Simone would later adapt into song, won first prize in Opportunity magazine’s 1926 poetry contest. Cuney also wrote art and music criticism for the Crisis. He later collaborated with the musician and civil rights activist Josh White on some of the songs on White’s 1941 album Southern Exposure, including “Hard Time Blues” and “Jim Crow Train.”

During the Second World War, Cuney served as a technical sergeant in the South Pacific. He self-published several broadsides after the war and co-edited Lincoln University Poets: Centennial Anthology, 1854–1954 (Fine Editions Press, 1954) with Hughes and Bruce Wright. Cuney published his first collection of poetry in the following decade, Puzzles (Stichting De Roos, 1960), but only in Holland, and the second, Storefront Church (Paul Bremen, 1973), in London. 

Cuney died on June 30, 1976.