Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872 to two formerly enslaved people from Kentucky. He became one of the first influential Black poets in American literature.

Dunbar began showing literary promise while still in high school in Dayton, Ohio, where he lived with his widowed mother. The only African American in his class, he became class president and class poet. By 1889, two years before he graduated, he had already published poems in the Dayton Herald and worked as editor of the short-lived Dayton Tattler, a Black newspaper published by classmate Orville Wright, who later gained fame with brother Wilbur Wright as inventors of the airplane.

Dunbar became one of the first African-American writers to establish an international reputation. In addition to his poems, short stories, and novels, he also wrote the lyrics for the musical comedy In Dahomey (1903), the first all-African-American musical produced on Broadway in New York. The musical later toured in the United States and the United Kingdom. Suffering from tuberculosis, which then had no cure, Dunbar died in Dayton, Ohio, at the age of 33.
~Biographical info from The Poetry Foundation and Wikipedia

Dunbar's poem "Keep A-Pluggin’ Away" is in IMPERFECT II.