After a brief minor-league baseball career, Delano Greenidge-Copprue earned his BA in literature from Rutgers College before studying at Columbia University, where he completed his graduate studies with two master's degrees and a doctorate. His doctoral thesis studied the jazz cadence of 19th- and 20th-century American literature, from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison. He continues to write about and discuss the interdisciplinary nature of jazz.
Professor Greenidge-Copprue has published writings on Zora Neale Hurston, Mark Twain, and nineteenth-century African-American history. Having completed a novel about baseball, migration, and jazz, he is at work on a fire-tempered ride into the heart of the American dream based in Times Square.