Samuel R. Delany

Born in 1942, Samuel Delany—known to his friends as Chip—graduated from the Bronx High School of Science and began to make his living writing science fiction and singing in coffee shops in the Greenwich Village area. On breaking up with his wife, the poet Marilyn Hacker, he decided to devote himself to music for six months during the fall and winter of ’67 and ’68. He lived with Heavenly Breakfast, the name both of a commune on New York’s Lower East Side and the rock band residing there, for which, along with Steve Greenbaum, Sue Schweers, and Bert Lee, Chip was a musician, singer, and arranger.

Later, he went on to write more science fiction, as well as fiction and nonfiction, and become a professor for the next thirty years at several universities, including SUNY Buffalo, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Temple University. He is the author of Dhalgren, the Stonewall-Book-Award-winning Dark Reflections, the widely-taught Times Square Red / Times Square Blue, and many nonfiction collections of essays. He retired in 2015 and lives with life-partner Dennis Rickett in Philadelphia, PA.