Poetry

Sterling A. Brown was renowned for his trenchant poetry and scholarship on African American folklife. A contemporary of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer, Brown became the first poet laureate of the District of Columbia. His celebrated...

Winner of the 2019 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry Pardon My Heart is an exploration of love in the contemporary African American ethos. In this lyrically complex collection, the speakers and subjects--the adult descendants of the Great Migration--reckon...

Vitamins of Hope, by Pamela Fields, is volume two to A Positive Version. This poetry book is another empowering poetry book of 50 additional poems that reveal the continuation of manifestation, healing, hope, self-love, revelation, reflection, free,...

In Black Skin is a reflective and illustrative poetry collection that takes the reader on a lyrical journey from Black enslavement in America to the Black Lives Matter movement. This literary work, divided into five chapters and inspired by actual...

As a person of deep faith, Marie cares and has real empathy for people. She put her life experiences and her love of her family into this book. If you want to know about her, read these poems and you get a glimpse of what it's like to walk in her shoes...

A landmark anthology of full-length works by Black American women writers of the 19th century including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Harriet Jacobs, and Mary Weston Fordham-edited and with an introduction by C.S.R. Calloway.Shadows Uplifted collects and...

Winner of the 2015 Little A Poetry Contest.A journey through girlhood, self-discovery, and the little acts of violence we inflict on one another.In an astounding debut poetry collection, Cave Canem, Callaloo, and Lambda Literary fellow Ife-Chudeni A...

In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, Cameos, to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the...

In the tradition of Alice Walker, this electrifying new African American voice delivers the verdict on the urban condition in a sensual, propulsive, and prophetic book of poetry and prose. Whether she is writing about an enraged teenager gone "wilding"...