Poetic Obituaries: A new literary genre had cropped up to

explore those conditions, in books like "Manchild in the Promised Land," by Claude Brown, and "The Autobiography of Malcolm X."

"Down These Mean Streets" joined that list. The memoir, Mr. [Piri] Thomas wrote on his Web site, had "exploded out of my guts in an outpouring of long suppressed hurts and angers that had boiled over into an ice-cold rage."

The novelist Daniel Stern, reviewing the book in The New York Times, called it "another stanza in the passionate poem of color and color-hatred being written today."

In the memoir, Mr. Thomas described how he was brought up as the only dark-skinned child among seven children, the son of a Puerto Rican mother, Dolores Montañez, and a Cuban father, Juan Tomás de la Cruz.

from The New York Times: Piri Thomas, Spanish Harlem Author, Dies at 83
then Los Angeles Times: Latino writer Piri Thomas dies at 83

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