Henry Lee Dumas was born on July 20, 1934, in Sweet Home, Arkansas, and moved to Harlem at the age of ten. He graduated from Commerce High School and studied at City College in New York before a stint in the U.S. Air Force. He was stationed on the Arabian Peninsula (which piqued his abiding interest in Arabic culture) and in San Antonio, Texas. Following discharge, Dumas attended Rutgers University, worked for a year at IBM, served on the staff of Upward Bound at Hiram College in Hiram, Ohio, and then taught at Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis from 1967 to 1968. At EHE, he was a colleague and friend of Eugene B. Redmond, who would become his literary executor.

An editor, supporter of, and contributor to numerous small magazines, Dumas was also active in the Civil Rights Movement and a seminal force in the Black Arts Movement. He and his wife, Loretta Ponton Dumas, had two sons, David and Michael, both of whom are deceased. On May 23, 1968, Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City Transit policeman in the subway. Circumstances of his death remain unclear.

Posthumous collections of Dumas’s poetry include Poetry for My People (1970), republished as Play Ebony Play Ivory (1974), and the first edition of Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas (1989). His books of fiction include Ark of Bones and Other Stories (1974), Jonoah and the Green Stone (a novel, 1976), Rope of Wind and Other Stories (1979), Goodbye Sweetwater: New and Selected Stories (1988), and Echo Tree: The Collected Short Fiction of Henry Dumas (2003).