Award-winning author and filmmaker Frank B. Wilderson, III was born in 1956. Originally from New Orleans, his family moved when he was six to Minneapolis, where they became the first Black homeowners in Kenwood. Both his parents were psychologists, and their academic careers moved the family through Chicago, Detroit, and eventually Berkeley, where Wilderson came of age under tutelage of the Black Power and student movements. In the late 1970s and 1980s he studied and taught poetry and fiction at The Loft Literary Center. He left Minneapolis again in 1989 to pursue an MFA in creative writing at Columbia University; later that same year he went to South Africa for the first time on a research trip funded by the Jerome Foundation on a grant for emerging artists.
He returned to Johannesburg in 1991 and for five years taught at local universities and participated in both above- and underground movements during the country's violent transition from apartheid. Wilderson was one of only two Americans elected to the African National Congress; he was also a member of the ANC's armed wing Umkhonto we Sizwe and continued to help them coordinate disinformation campaigns, psychological warfare, and more even after Nelson Mandela ordered their disbanding in 1995. Soon after Wilderson returned to the US, where he now teaches African American studies and drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Incognegro (2008) and Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (forthcoming) and the director of Reparations...Now, a film in progress.
His creative writing has garnered numerous awards including The Eisner Prize for Creative Achievement of the Highest Order; The Judith Stronach Award for Poetry; The Crothers Short Story Award; The Jerome Foundation Artists and Writers Award; The Loft- McKnight Award for Best Prose in the State of Minnesota; and The Maya Angelou Award for Best Fiction Portraying the Black Experience in America.