Robert Hayden

Asa Bundy Sheffey was born on the fourth of August 1913 at Detroit, Michigan, the son of Asa and Ruth Sheffey, working-class parents who separated when he was eighteen months old. He was placed by his mother in the care of foster parents William and Sue Ellen Hayden at the Paradise Valley district of Detroit; the foster parents renamed him Robert Earl Hayden and never disclosed to him until his late adolescence the existence of his birth parents. He was raised in straitened circumstances by foster parents whose marriage was profoundly unhappy; he had severe myopia from childhood and could not be admitted to public sports.

He turned to reading at the Detroit Public Library through his teens and was sufficiently distinguished a student at the Northern High School of Detroit to be admitted to Detroit City College — now Wayne State — on a state scholarship in 1932. He graduated in 1936. He worked thereafter on the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA at Detroit from 1936 to 1940. He took the master's degree at the University of Michigan under W. H. Auden in 1942.

He converted to the Bahá'í Faith in 1942. The conversion — to which he had been introduced by his wife Erma Inez Morris, also a Bahá'í — was the decisive intellectual moment of his life and would furnish the universalist theological grammar that distinguished his poetry from the more racially-particularist work of the contemporaneous Black Arts Movement. He held faculty appointments at Fisk University from 1946 to 1969 and at the University of Michigan from 1969 to his death.

His decisive collections — Heart-Shape in the Dust of 1940, Figure of Time of 1955, A Ballad of Remembrance of 1962, Selected Poems of 1966 — established him as one of the central American poets of his generation. The 1962 Ballad of Remembrance — published abroad by Paul Breman in London after multiple American publishers refused it — won the Grand Prize for Poetry at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966.

He was appointed Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1976 and served two annual terms — the first African American to hold the office. He died at Ann Arbor on the twenty-fifth of February 1980, at sixty-six.

He is honored here as the first Black Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.