Conrad Kent Rivers (1933–1968) was an American poet, fiction writer and dramatist.
[1] Rivers was part of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC), conceived during the era of the Civil Rights Movement as a collective of African-American writers, artists, historians, educators, intellectuals, community activists, a group that included such intellectuals as Hoyt W. Fuller and Gerald McWorter (later Abdul Alkalimat).
However, he was also fascinated with traditional poetic forms and techniques and his work evidences the influence of established writers such as his uncle Ray Mclvers, James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and James Baldwin.
[1]According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, The lasting significance of Conrad Kent Rivers's poetry lay in the fact that he spoke for a generation of young blacks forced to make the transition from the helpless, often hopeless 1950s to the chaotic, rage-filled 1960s.
Young blacks, taught in the fifties to contain their individuality for safety's sake, could well understand Rivers's overwhelming concern with loneliness, alienation, and rejection and his responding to the new possibilities of the 1960s with only tentative energy.