Calvin Baker Biography
Calvin Baker is an American novelist, educator, essayist and editor. His interests include constructions of American identity, cosmopolitanism, postcolonialism, modernism, geography, and science.
Calvin Baker Age
He was born in 1972, in Chicago, Illinois, United States of America. Baker is 52 years old as of 2023.
Calvin Baker Education
Baker attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools before graduating from Amherst College in 1994 with high honors in English.
Calvin Baker Family
Attempts to establish the identities of his family, his mother, and his father were in vain since no information about them is available to the public. It’s therefore not known whether he has any siblings.
Calvin Baker Career
When he was 23, his debut novel, Naming the New World (1998), was sold to A Wyatt Books and published by St. Martin’s Press. The tale begins in Africa prior to contact with Europe and concludes in contemporary America. The story uses postmodern approaches to integrate a single consciousness over time. Numerous publications, including Time magazine, heralded it as the beginning of a significant new voice in American letters. His second novel, Once Two Heroes (2003), uses a dual narrative structure, one white and one black, to examine the midcentury link between America and Europe, as well as 20th-century violence, via the lens of World War II and the American experience of racial lynching. His third novel, Dominion (2006), deals with the promise and potentialities of pre-Revolutionary America.
Bold Type Books released Baker’s first nonfiction book, A More Perfect Reunion: Race, Integration, and America’s Future, in 2020. Esquire named him one of America’s top emerging writers in 2005. Dominion was a finalist for the Hurston/Wright Award and one of Newsday’s Best Books of the Year. Critics and writers include Joseph O’Neill, Junot Díaz, Jeffery Renard Allen, Francisco Goldman, Dale Peck, Maud Newton, and Hannah Tinti have all praised his work. Peck, well-known for his critical takedowns, has named Baker one of his favorite living writers, stating of Grace: “He works in a rarefied strain of literature whose practitioners include Faulkner, Morrison, Calvino, and Cormac McCarthy.”
Baker collaborated with Peck and publisher John Oakes to relaunch the Evergreen Review, a literary journal founded by Barney Rosset and influential in promoting writers like Samuel Beckett. Baker previously worked as a journalist at the New Orleans Times-Picayune, Time Inc., and The Village Voice. His work has also been featured in Harper’s Magazine and The New York Times Magazine. His longform poem, Notes for a Spanish Odyssey, on race and migration in Spain, was released as a Kindle Single on Amazon and is now part of the New York Public Library’s permanent digital collection. He has taught in Yale’s English Department, Columbia University’s MFA Program, and the American Studies Department at the University of Leipzig in Germany.
Calvin Baker Net Worth
Baker has an estimated net worth of 1 million dollars.
Calvin Baker Books
A More Perfect Reunion.
Grace.
Dominion .
Once Two Heroes
Naming the New World.