Poetry

A harbinger of the Harlem Renaissance first published in 1922, this collection of poignant, lyrical poems explores Claude McKay's yearning for his Jamaican homeland and the bitter plight of Black and African Caribbean people in America--now with an...

Winner of the Spring 2020 Black River Chapbook Competition. The poem from which BLACK UNDER derives its title opens with a resounding declaration: I am black and black underneath. These words are an anthem that reverberates throughout Ashanti Anderson's...

"I have never been anything but a paper girl. Something to tear into pieces. Something to burn." We've all been paper before. We've all been fragile. Leaflike and gently blowing, enough to create stories or build fires. We go through life like that. We...

The selected poems from over fifty years by the great poet and biographer and friend of Miles Davis. Quincy Troupe writes poetry in great waves. The words are just notes. It's the music you make with them that matters. He's not a wordsmith, he's a shaman...

James Brown. John Brown's raid. Brown v. the Topeka Board of Ed. The prizewinning author of Blue Laws meditates on all things brown in this powerful new collection. "Vital and sophisticated ... sinks hooks into you that cannot be easily removed." --The...

Revenge Body is a poetry collection that explores anger (righteous and not), black identity, body image, loss, want, and mental health.

In Claim Tickets for Stolen People, Quintin Collins embraces a range of poetic forms and registers to show the resilience of Blackness in a colonized world. The tension between mortality and vitality is ever-present, whether Collins is charting his...

Nationally acclaimed for her poem, To The Oklahoma Lawmakers, which MoveOn.org called "The most riveting message about the war on women in under three minutes," Zuniga's newest collection of poetry, The Smell of Good Mud, explores the wild terrain of...

We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a collection of political love poems rendered through the eyes of Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, an immigrant living in New York City. For many women of color, aging in America means experiencing a lack of proper medical treatment,...

with/holding is a collection of genre-blurring poems that examines the representation and reproduction of Blackness across communication media and popular culture. Together, text and image call up a nightmarish and seemingly insatiable...

Alice Walker, author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple-an American novel of permanent importance (San Francisco Chronicle)-crafts a bilingual collection that is both playfully imaginative and intensely moving...

Angela Jackson returns with a poetic collage that draws on imagery from the African American South and the South Side of Chicago, storytelling, the Black Arts Movement, and Hausa folklore. Deftly intertwining narrative and free verse, she expresses the...

BloodFresh is a celebration of identity. Ebony Stewart reclaims her own narrative to speak against the racism and colorism she's experienced, while criticizing society's treatment of women as sexual objects. This collection reaffirms the reader through...

Where contemporary conversation fails, poetry sustains. And poetry has sustained the lives of many.Arranged in three sections, Bantu Knots & Butterflies is a collection of poetry that was born out of the reflections of poet Maryam Azeeza Muhammad. This...