Stanley Crouch, author of the long awaited new biography of famed jazzman Charlie Parker, Kansas City Lightning, has been writing about jazz music and the African American experience for more than forty years. He has twice been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award, for his essay collections Notes of a Hanging Judge (1990) and The All-American Skin Game (1995). His other books include Always in Pursuit (1998), The Artificial White Man (2004), and the novel Don’t the Moon Look Lonesome (2000). His writing has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Vogue, Downbeat, Partisan Review, The New Republic, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He has served, off and on, since 1987 as artistic consultant for jazz programming at Lincoln Center and is a founder of the jazz department known as Jazz at Lincoln Center. He is also executive vice president of the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation. On television, he has appeared in the Ken Burns documentaries Jazz and the remastered DVD edition of The Civil War; has guest-hosted Charlie Rose and appeared as a commentator on 60 Minutes; he has been twice profiled by C-Span and has appeared as a guest on many radio and television shows. A winner of the MacArthur “Genius” Award, he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a regular columnist for the New York Daily News.