Calvin Baker

Calvin Baker was born in Chicago, attended the University of Chicago Lab Schools, and graduated from Amherst College. At the age of twenty-three, he published Naming the New World, which Publishers Weekly called "brilliant ... [Baker] proves himself a powerful new male voice in African American literature." With his second novel, Once Two Heroes, and his third, Dominion, Baker has continued to garner acclaim from major media including USA Today, The Village Voice, and GQ. Dominion was a finalist for the Hurston-Wright Award, as well as one of New York Newsday's Best Books of the Year. In 2005, Esquire Magazine named him one of the best young writers in America.

Dominion tells the story of Jasper Merian, newly freed from slavery in Virginia at the close of the seventeenth century, who leaves for the uncharted free territory to the west. There, he aims to carve out a utopia in the wilderness of the Carolinas. Despite the hardships of frontier life, Jasper and his wife, Sanne, manage to build a thriving estate, ministered in turn by Jasper's son Magnus and his grandson Caleum. Their lives bring them up against the natural (and occasionally supernatural) world, colonial politics, the injustices of slavery, the Revolutionary War, and questions of fidelity and the heart.

Baker currently lives in New York.

Bibliography:

Dominion (2006)

Once Two Heroes (2003)

Naming the New World (1999)

Links:

NPR conversation with Farai Chideya
One Story interview