Paul Beatty (b.1962 USA) began his career as a poet and was crowned the first Poetry Slam Champion of the Nuyorian Poets Café in New York. Beatty draws from a variety of pop-culture sources such as hip-hop, jazz, comic books, kung-fu films and basketball, as inspiration for his work. His writing is both biting and satirical, taking aim at hot topics such as Afrocentrism, white liberal political correctness, academics, athletics, and multiculturalism. After publishing two collections of poetry, Big Bank Takes Little Bank and Joker, Joker Deuce, Beatty moved to prose with the publication of his first novel, The White Boy Shuffle in1996. Other books include Tuff and Slumberland both about young black men coming of age, discovering politics, and finding adventure; one on the streets an stoops of Spanish Harlem, the other in the Jazz clubs of a newly reunified Berlin. Beatty received an M.F.A. in creative writing from Brooklyn College and an M.A. in psychology from Boston University. Paul Beatty grew up in Los Angeles and currently lives and works in New York.

Paul Beatty spent a month in 2000 at the Gardner Museum writing. In October of the same year, he returned to give an Eye of the Beholder talk about his work and to read from his new novel Tuff in the Spanish Cloister. During this time, Beatty also led a poetry workshop for teens from the Alternative School at the Little House. The students spent time viewing and talking about the current special exhibition Rembrant Creates Rembrandt and then wrote about their own sense of identity; how they are viewed by others, the different roles they play, and how they view themselves. At the Alternative School, Beatty asked the students to find adjectives to describe themselves as they are in school and then, separately, out of school. The end project was to write a poem using these adjectives. Students who worked with Paul Beatty in these sessions concurred that the experience had impacted their lives and their writing.