Poetry

Mississippi native Natasha Trethewey, author of "Bellocq's Ophelia" and "Domestic Work," has been awarded the Grolier Poetry Prize and a Pushcart Prize. Her work was also included in "The Best American Poetry 2000." Trethewey now lives in Decatur,...

Winner of the 2020 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize Longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry "[Trethewey's poems] dig beneath the surface of history--personal or communal, from childhood or from a century ago--to explore the human...

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...

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...