• The single issue of Fire!! was published in November; it was edited by Wallace Thurman. The purpose of this avant-garde magazine was to provide a more experimental outlet for young black writers. The staff of Fire!!: Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston (editors), John P. Davis (business manager), Richard Bruce Nugent (in charge of distribution), Aaron Douglas (cover designer and illustrator).

• The William E. Harmon Awards for Distinguished Achievement were announced. Seven of these awards (literature, music, fine arts, industry, science, religion, and race relations) were open to black Americans, and the eighth award was open to any person of American residence.

• W. E. B. DuBois organized a little theatre group through The Crisis Magazine. The group became known as the Crigwa Players, which stood for the Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists (the name was soon changed to Krigwa). DuBois postulated four principles for the little theatre movement: the plays must be about us, by us, for us, and near us. The Harlem Branch of the New York Public Library served as the group’s home base, and two of their first performances were of Willis Richardson’s Compromise and The Broken Banjo.

• Langston Hughes was awarded the Witter Bynner Prize for the best poetry submitted by an American undergraduate. His award was given based on a collection of five poems, one of which was “The House in Taos.” In this very same contest, Waring Cuney received an honorable mention.

• Gwendolyn B. Bennett was hired by Crisis Magazine to write a literary and fine arts column, “Ebony Flute,” that provided regular news about writers, visual and performing artists, and musicians who were instrumental in shaping the artistic movement.

• Langston Hughes presented his famous manifest, "The Negro and the Racial Mountain," in which he attacks the tendency of middle-class blacks to suppress their Black selves and heritage in an uncritical embrace of whiteness.

• Carl Van Vechten published Nigger Heaven.

• Langston Hughes published The Weary Blues. This was his first published collection of poetry.

• Richard Bruce Nugent’s "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade" was the first literary work on an explicitly homosexual theme to be published by a Black American.

• Opportunity’s 2^nd Annual Prize Winners that were affiliated with Washington, D.C. are as follows:

Poetry

Shared one-half of the first and second prizes: Waring Cuney for "No Images"

Essay

2^nd prize: Brenda Moryck for "A Man I Know"