Poetry

He was a son of Africa who became father to a nation and, for billions of people around the world, a beacon of hope, courage, and perseverance in the face of opposition. Now, acclaimed poet Maya Angelou honors the life and remarkable soul of Nelson...

A Peculiar People creates an entire microcosm within these poems. Steven Willis crafts an entire cast of characters, showcasing their struggles, identities, & underlying emotions. Willis champions the art of storytelling: weaving pop-culture and...

Season 15 winner of America's Got Talent, Brandon Leake, presents his debut poetry collection. Brandon is the first spoken word poet to compete on AGT and to receive the Golden Buzzer award in the first round, going on to win the entire competition! From...

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...

Scattered Clouds: New & Selected Poems is a volume of lyrical, emotionally forthright meditations on love, loss, and longing. The poems are often sobering, but they are not, to quote Langston Hughes, "without laughter." Scattered Clouds contains the...

In Poetry Explosion, Patricia Glass passionately writes enduring, inspirational poetry with a personal touch. The whole world can enjoy Poetry Explosion due to its diversified content. Poetry Explosion has the power to permanently change how we view...

Tenderly, joyously, sometimes in sadness, sometimes in pain, Maya Angelou writes from the heart andcelebrates life as only she has discovered it. Inthis moving volume of poetry, we hear themulti-faceted voice of one of the most powerful andvibrant...

Magical Negro is an archive of black everydayness, a catalog of contemporary folk heroes, an ethnography of ancestral grief, and an inventory of figureheads, idioms, and customs. These American poems are both elegy and jive, joke and declaration, songs...

Now in paperback, Claudia Rankine's "skyscraper in the literature on racism" (Christian Science Monitor) In Just Us, Claudia Rankine invites us into a necessary conversation about Whiteness in America. What would it take for us to breach the silence,...

Porsha Olayiwola's debut poetry collection soars with the power and presence of live performance. These poems dip their hands into the fabric of black womanhood and revel in it. Shimmer establishes Olayiwola firmly in the lineage of black queer poetics,...

I am the Rage is not just a poetry book. It is a call-to-action.This evocative collection of thirty poems puts readers in the position of feeling, reflecting, and empathizing with what it means to be Black in America today. Dr. Martina McGowan, a doctor...

Winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets Layered, complex, and infinitely compelling, Chet'la Sebree's Field Study is a daring exploration of the self and our interactions with others--a meditation on desire, race, loss...

In fierce, agile poems, Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration--canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace--and, in doing so,...

There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading...

Explore, through 65 poems and letters, the depths of black mental health, belief in a higher power, stimulant usage, reliance on family, and love. With an emphasis on the mental, physical, and spiritual resilience of black people, it relates the journey...

One thing is for certain, Black Men Do Cry! Ever care to ask yourself why? Consider the emotional burden of love, loss, defeat, and mental disparity. Is that necessarily just a Black thing, or can others relate as well?   Commonality within...