Celebrating Black Poets

Walking Gentry Home tells the story of Alora Young’s ancestors. The lives of these girls and women come together to form a unique American epic in verse, one that speaks of generational curses, coming of age, homes and small towns, fleeting loves and lasting consequences, and the brutal and ever-present legacy of slavery in our nation’s psyche. Together they form a heart-wrenching and inspiring family saga of girls and women connected through blood and history.

Joshua Bennett further extends his range into the realm of speculative fiction, while addressing issues as varied as abolition, Black ecological consciousness, and the boundless promise of parenthood.

In this imaginative, blistering poetry collection, poet and musician Melania Luisa Marte looks at the identities and histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti to celebrate and center the Black diasporic experience. Through the exploration of themes like self-love, nationalism, displacement, generational trauma, and ancestral knowledge, this collection uproots stereotypes while creating a new joyous vision for Black identity and personhood. Plantains and Our Becoming is “a full-throated war cry; both a request for anointment and the responding bendición” (Elizabeth Acevedo).

From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself — and us — home. Each poem explores what it means to be a daughter of Newark, and America — and the painful, joyous path to adulthood as a young, queer Black woman.

Inspired by The Wiz, this debut, full-length poetry collection celebrates South Side Chicago and a Black woman’s quest for self-discovery — one that pulls her away from the safety of home and into her power. Subverting monolithic ideas about the South Side of Chicago, and re-casting the city as a living, breathing entity, I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times spans sestinas, sonnets, free-verse, and erasures, all to reimagine the concept of home. Chicago isn’t just a city, but a teacher, a lingering shadow, a way of seeing the world.

These poems consider the brevity and disposability of Black lives and other oppressed people in our current era of emboldened white supremacy, and the use of the Black vernacular in America’s vast reserve of racial and gendered epithets. Finna explores the erasure of peoples in the American narrative; asks how gendered language can provoke violence; and finally, how the Black vernacular, expands our notions of possibility, giving us a new language of hope.

In Call Us What We Carry, Amanda Gorman explores history, language, identity, and erasure through an imaginative and intimate collage. Harnessing the collective grief of a global pandemic, these poems shine a light on a moment of reckoning and reveal that Gorman has become our messenger from the past, our voice for the future.

Jacqueline Woodson’s National Book Award and Newbery Honor winner, Brown Girl Dreaming is a powerful memoir that tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse.

A groundbreaking collection about Afropioneerism past and present from Pushcart Prize-nominated poet and New York Times bestselling author Rio Cortez. In poems that range from wry, tongue-in-cheek observations about contemporary life to more nuanced meditations on her ancestors — some of the earliest Black pioneers to settle in the western United States after Reconstruction — Golden Ax invites readers to re-imagine the West, Black womanhood, and the legacies that shape and sustain the pursuit of freedom.

Sonia Sanchez, a leading writer of the Black Arts Movement and the American Poetry Society’s 2018 Wallace Stevens Award–winner, shares an extraordinary retrospective covering over thirty years of her work.

From navigating the oft competing worlds of religion and desire, to balancing society’s expectations with the raw experience of being a woman in the world; from detailing the experiences of growing up as a first generation black British woman, to working through situations of dependence and abuse; from finding solace in the echoing caverns of depression and loss, to exploring the vulnerability and redemption in falling in love, each of the raw and immediate poems in Daley-Ward’s bone resonates to the core of what it means to be human.

Whether it’s the fireflies of a Louisiana summer caught in a mason jar (doomed by their collection) or his grandmother, Mama Annie, who latches the screen door when someone steps out for just a moment, all that makes up our flickering precarious joy, all that we want to protect, is lifted into the light in this moving book. Stones becomes an ode to Young’s home places and his dear departed, and to what of them — of us — poetry can save.

Here in one volume is a selection of the extraordinary poems of Rita Dove, who, as the nation’s Poet Laureate from 1993 to 1995, brought poetry into the lives of millions of people. Along with a new introduction and poem, Selected Poems comprises Dove’s collections The Yellow House on the Corner, which includes a group of poems devoted to the themes of slavery and freedom; Museum, intimate ruminations on home and the world; and finally, Thomas and Beulah, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1987, a verse cycle loosely based on her grandparents’ lives.

Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance.

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition.

Jonah Mixon-Webster works at the intersections of space and the body, race and region, sexuality and class. Stereo(TYPE) is a reckoning and a force, a revision of our most sacred mythologies, and a work of documentary reporting from Mixon-Webster’s hometown of Flint, Michigan, where clean tap water remains an uncertainty and the aftermath of racist policies persist.

The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth. Alice Walker opens us to feeling and understanding, with poems that cover a broad spectrum of emotions. With profound artistry, Walker searches for, discovers, and declares the fundamental beauty of existence, as she explores what it means to experience life fully, to learn from it, and to grow both as an individual and as part of a greater spiritual community.

Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts.

James Weldon Johnson was a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and one of the most revered African Americans of all time, whose life demonstrated the full spectrum of struggle and success. In God’s Trombones, one of his most celebrated works, inspirational sermons of African American preachers are reimagined as poetry, reverberating with the musicality and splendid eloquence of the spirituals.

With her first full-length poetry collection, Warsan Shire introduces us to a young girl, who, in the absence of a nurturing guide, makes her own way toward womanhood. Drawing from her own life, as well as pop culture and news headlines, Shire finds vivid, unique details in the experiences of refugees and immigrants, mothers and daughters, Black women and teenage girls. In Shire’s hands, lives spring into fullness. The long-awaited collection from one of our most exciting contemporary poets, this book is a blessing, an incantatory celebration of resilience and survival.

Twenty-five years ago, Robin Coste Lewis discovered a stunning collection of photographs in an old suitcase under her bed. Lewis’s family had survived one of the largest migrations in human history, when six million Americans fled the South. These photographs of daily twentieth-century Black life revealed a concealed, interior history. The poetry Lewis joins to these vivid images stands forth as an inspiring alternative to the usual ways we frame the old stories of “race” and “migration,” placing them within a much vaster span of time and history.

This volume collects both Phillis Wheatley’s letters and her poetry: hymns, elegies, translations, philosophical poems, tales, and epyllions – including a poignant plea to the Earl of Dartmouth urging freedom for America and comparing the country’s condition to her own. With her contemplative elegies and her use of the poetic imagination to escape an unsatisfactory world, Wheatley anticipated the Romantic Movement of the following century. 

Sonia Sanchez’s collection of haiku celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration. Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning.