Amiri Baraka served as Poet Laureate of New Jersey in 2002 and 2003. He was born in Newark in 1934 and died in Newark in 2014. His 53-year career, although blighted by controversy, also produced the most searing, unequivocable, dramatic, shocking and nasty-ass book. It was a fictional account about living in the Black ghettos of Newark, entitled The System of Dante’s Hell, comparing Newark itself to Dante’s Inferno of the 14^th Century, describing Hell on Earth.