Robert O'Meally

Columbia University

Robert G. O’Meally is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English at Columbia University, where he has served on the faculty for thirty years. Former director of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies, O’Meally is the author of The Craft of Ralph Ellison, Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday, The Jazz Singers, and Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey. His newest books are The Romare Bearden Reader (2019) and Antagonistic Cooperation: Collage, Jazz, and American Fiction (2022). According to his sons, Mr. O’Meally plays the soprano saxophone “for his own amazement.”