American writer Melvin Dixon was BOTD in 1950. Born in Stamford, Connecticut, he studied at Wesleyan University and completed a doctorate at Brown University. In 1980, he became a professor of literature at Queens College in New York City. His 1983 debut poetry collection Change of Territory, reflected his interest in his family’s Southern and African roots and his experiences living in Paris in the mid-1970s. Other poems expand Melvin’s concept of “family” to include African-American literary influences such as Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison. Critically praised, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in 1984. His debut novel Trouble the Water, a surrealist bildungsroman about an African-American man returning to his childhood home in North Carolina, was awarded the Charles H. and N. Mildred Nilon Excellence in Minority Fiction Award in 1989. He wrote extensively about African-American literature, producing the now-seminal textbook Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature in 1987. His 1991 novel Vanishing Rooms, a portrait of an interracial gay relationship set in Greenwich Village, was heavily influenced by (and compared, admiringly, to) Baldwin’s novels Giovanni’s Room and If Beale Street Could Talk. Dixon died of an AIDS-related illness in 1992, aged 42. His final novel, Love’s Instruments, was published posthumously in 1995.