We’re proud to announce that our 2011 inductee into the American Poets’ Corner is native New Yorker and fearless writer James Baldwin. A Native New Yorker from Harlem, James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) was shaped by the Jim Crow era, the black church, and by Greenwich Village, where he moved when he was 17. He escaped a strict, religious stepfather who had shepherded him into a career as a preacher when he was just 14. Yet those early years served him well. He recalled, “Those three years in the pulpit — I didn’t realize it then — that is what turned me into a writer, really, dealing with all that anguish and that despair and that beauty.”