Samuel R. Delany — American Author born on April 01, 1942,

Samuel Ray Delany, Jr., Chip Delany to his friends, is an American author, professor and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism, and essays on sexuality and society... (wikipedia)

Science fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there. It's also thinking about how that world might be - a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they - and all of us - have to be able to think about a world that works differently.
All too often, when creative people pick out someone else's creative work as an inspiration, what they end up with is very, very far from the original.
Linguistics is very much a science. It's a human science, one of the human sciences. And it's one of the more interesting human sciences.
'Dhalgren' is the kind of book in which you can look for pretty much anything you want. I tried to put as much into it as I could at the time.
From 1968 on, I was pretty much the black, gay SF writer.