Literary Criticism

Many people consider Morrison's novels difficult to read. Most of her readers have at least one book on their shelves that they couldn't finish or, when they did finish one, just scratched their heads in confusion. And when we think we are sure we know...

Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral by Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mr. John Wheatley, of Boston, in New England (published 1 September 1773) is a collection of 39 poems written by Phillis Wheatley, the first professional...

Included in this extraordinary volume are the poems of 43 of America's most talented African American wordsmiths, including Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove, Natasha Tretheway, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Tracy K. Smith, as well as the work of other...

With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular media, and films, and discusses its place in current...

A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African...

The moving story of the life of the woman behind A Raisin in the Sun, the most widely anthologized, read, and performed play of the American stage, by the New York Times bestselling author of Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee   Written when...

Palestine as Metaphor consists of a series of interviews with Mahmoud Darwish, which have never appeared in English before. The interviews are a wealth of information on the poet's personal life, his relationships, his numerous works, and his tragedy...

From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature and author of the Cairo Trilogy, comes Akhenaten, a fascinating work of fiction about the most infamous pharaoh of ancient Egypt. In this beguiling novel, originally published in Arabic in 1985, Mahfouz...

Mystic and poet Abū al-Hasan al-Shushtarī (1212-1269) remains a towering figure in North African Sufism. His verses are still well loved and often recited, and his songs are arguably the most vibrant element of Islamic Spain's cultural legacy...

Born in New Orleans in 1875 to a mother who was formerly enslaved and a father of questionable identity, Alice Dunbar-Nelson was a pioneering activist, writer, suffragist, and educator. Until now, Dunbar-Nelson has largely been viewed only in relation to...

A thrilling story about a young black male, his angry triumph over abandonment is made by committing the ultimate sin. In a tale of murder and sexuality, Heart- a southern Black college student filled with bitterness and resentment, finds in the error of...

Montreal writer Dany Laferrière became Immortal in 2015, when he was inducted into the Académie française, the highest honour in all French literature - and the first Quebecer and only second Black writer to receive such an honour. In these wide-ranging...