Born July 22, 1939 in St. Louis, Missiouri, Quincy Troupe is an awarding-winning author of eight volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works. In 2010 he received the American Book Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement.
Among his best-selling works are Miles: The Autobiography of Miles Davis and his memoir, Miles & Me. Other works are: The Pursuit of Happyness, an autobiography he wrote with Chris Gardner that became a major motion picture and that was a New York Times bestseller for over 40 weeks; The Architecture of Language, a book of poems, that won the 2007 Paterson Award for Sustained Literary Achievement. 
 Chris Hildreth
"For me, one of the most revealing moments of the festival came the morning I sauntered into Waterloo's old church while Quincy Troupe was speaking about poetry. The size of the crowd made it difficult even to find a place to stand. What I found so striking was the rapt attention of the audience as it hung on the poet's every word--striking because the listeners were all high school kids."
Robert Kendall, Poets & Writers Magazine, Sep/Oct 1991 
Transcircularities: New and Selected Poems won the 2003 Milt Kessler Poetry Award and was selected by Publishers Weekly as one of the ten best books of poetry in 2002. Errançities, his newest book of poems, will be published in November 2011 by Coffee House Press, and a new children’s book, Hallelujah: The Story of Ray Charles with illustrations by Brian Pinkney, will be published by Disney/Hyperion in February 2013.
Quincy Troupe is professor emeritus of the University of California, San Diego, and editor of Black Renaissance Noire, a literary journal of the Institute of Africana Studies at New York University.