Poetry

Everybody has a story to tell, and this story is told in a most unique way-through the beauty, rhythm, and honesty of poetry.The author's story is one that has yet to be completed or even reach its peak, but he has experienced many things in his...

In Every Hard Sweetness, Carter-Jones chronicles Civil Rights' era atrocities through the story of her family's experience with an all-too-common practice in which Black men were wrongfully incarcerated in institutions for the criminally insane. The...

Lynne Thompson's Blue on a Blue Palette reflects on the condition of women--their joys despite their histories, and their insistence on survival as issues of race, culture, pandemic, and climate threaten their livelihoods. The documentation of these...

Sweeping from the eighteenth century to futurist fabulations, Black Bell harmonizes poetry with performance art practices in an investigation of fugitivity.Inspired by the nineteenth century image of an enslaved woman wearing iron horns and bells, Alison...

An open mouth...open to bear witness, to show what lives inside, to share what must come forward: the poems in this collection add one more voice to the human chorus that sings as proof of life - funky, messy, soulful, struggling, exhilarating life.

Through invention and remembrance, a little bump in the earth creates a black town on a hill--its land, its losses, its living and ancestral dead.Tyree Daye's a little bump in the earth is an act of invention and remembrance. Through sprawling poems, the...

The poetry of Nikki Giovanni has spurred movements, turned hearts and informed generations. She's been hailed as a firebrand, a radical, a healer, and a sage; a wise and courageous voice who has spoken out on the sensitive issues, including race and...

One study (NCBI, 2014*) showed that 63% of Black people believe that a mental health condition is a sign of personal weakness. This belief has resulted in many experiencing shame in coming forward about mental health struggles for fear of being demonized...

I, John De Conqueror, is a much needed examination of how the word, the pen, and the body when possessed by Black men can be used to illuminate the horrors of racism and whiteness, and the tribulations of humanity's loss. This is a book well worth the...

Miya Coleman's premier collection, Cottonmouth paints the picture of what makes up a home, and also, more importantly, what doesn't. Readers join Coleman as she journeys through her own conceptions of race, religion, beauty, and addiction to uncover what...

The raw poems inside Song of My Softening studies the ever-changing relationship with oneself, while also investigating the relationship that the world and nation has with Black queerness. Poems open wide the questioning of how we express both love and...

Selected by Amaud Jamaul Johnson for the 2023 Jake Adam York Prize, Yalie Saweda Kamara's Besaydoo is an elegantly wrought love song to home--as place, as people, as body, and as language.A griot is a historian, a living repository of communal legacies...