Arna Wendell Bontemps

In 1932, Arna Wendell Bontemps, a teacher at Oakwood College in Huntsville, Alabama collaborated with Langston Hughes and wrote “Popo and Fifina”. This story followed the lives of siblings Popo and Fifina, in an easy-to-understand introduction to Haitian life for children. Bontemps continued writing children’s novels and published “You Can’t Pet a Possum” (1934), which followed a story of a boy and his pet dog living in a rural part of Huntsville, Alabama.

During the early 1900s, Arnaud “Arna” Wendell Bontemps was a well-known poet and author. Like his close friend Langston Hughes and their fellow writers in the Harlem Renaissance, Arna Bontemps explored African-American experience in a wide variety of genres. As a poet, novelist, historian, anthologist, and archivist, he enriched and preserved black cultural heritage.

Professor Bontemps was born in Alexandria, Louisiana in 1902. His family moved to Los Angeles, California when he was three years old. He graduated from Pacific Union College in 1923 and after graduation moved New York to teach at Harlem Academy. In 1931, he moved to Huntsville, Alabama to teach at Oakwood. Bontemps died in 1973.