Edward S. Silvera

Edward S. Silvera was born in Florida in 1906 and relocated to Orange, New Jersey, later during his childhood. He graduated from Orange High School in 1924. By the time he published poetry in Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk (Harper & Brothers, 1927), he was in his junior year at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Alongside fellow poets and Lincoln University alums, Waring Cuney, William Allyn Hill, and Langston Hughes, Silvera’s poetry was published in Four Lincoln University Poets (Lincoln University, 1930). Hughes had worked with the university to organize the anthology and sought permission to reprint poems by Silvera that had originally been published in the Crisis. Silvera also had two poems anthologized in Charles S. Johnson’s Ebony and Topaz (National Urban League, 1927).