Born in Harlem, Sundiata came of age as an artist during the Black Arts/Black Aesthetic movement of the 1960s and 1970s. He has been a Sundance Institute Screenwriting Fellow, a Columbia University Revson Fellow, a Master Artist-in-Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Florida) and the first Writer-in-Residence at the New School University in New York. He was featured in the Bill Moyers’ PBS series on poetry, “The Language of Life,” and as part of Russell Simmons’ Def Poetry Jam on HBO. Sundiata is currently a professor at Eugene Lang College in New York City.