Quincy Troupe  Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. (born July 22, 1939) is an American poet, editor, journalist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, in La Jolla, California. He is best known as the biographer of Miles Davis, the jazz musician. Troupe is the son of baseball catcher Quincy Trouppe (who added a second "P" to the family name while playing in Mexico to accommodate the Spanish pronunciation "Trou-pay"). As a teenager in 1955, he recalled hearing Miles Davis at a St. Louis, Missouri fish joint, where some fellow patrons identified the 78 rpm juke box record as "Donna" which was Davis' first recorded composition (The record is most likely to have been the Charlie Parker Quintet session recorded for Savoy Records, May 8, 1947). In his book "Miles and Me" he recalls the experience: As a young man Troupe was athletic and attended Grambling State University on a basketball scholarship. However, after his first year he quit and subsequently joined the United States Army, where he was stationed in France and playing on the Army basketball team. While in France he had a chance encounter with the noted French Existentialist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, who recommended that Troupe try his hand at poetry. When he returned to civilian life, Troupe moved to Los Angeles where he became a regular presence at the Watts Writers Workshop and began working in a more jazz-based style. It was on a tour with the Watts group that he first began his academic life as a teacher. The Watts Writers Workshop was located in a building that also had a theater, allowing members to do readings, workshops, plays and presentations. It was a meeting point for many in the Black Power movement, Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement and through it Troupe met many individuals involved in other cities including Ishmael Reed (Umbra Group), James Baldwin. In 1968, he edited the anthology, "Watts Poets: A Book of New Poetry and Essays." According to the Poetry Foundation, his work is associated with Black Arts Movement writers such as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Wanda Coleman, Haki Madhubuti and Ismael Reed, who were also friends. Their work was diverse but was strongly informed by world literature and jazz music. Some time later it emerged that the Workshop had been a target of the covert FBI counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, and that the Workshop, along with its theater were burned to the ground, in 1973 by the FBI informant and infiltrator, Darthard Perry (a.k.a. Ed Riggs).