Poetry

West Oakland to West Africa (WO2WA) provides a sustained exchange to connect members of the African Diaspora and Africa through creative writing. Our core values are to create a safe place for the transparent healing and growth of Black people; to...

"Tracy K. Smith's poetry is an awakening itself." --Vogue Celebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume,...

Examines firsthand the lives of legendary Black writers who made a way out of no way to illuminate a road map for budding creators desiring to follow in their footsteps Acclaimed Cave Canem poet and essayist Remica Bingham-Risher interweaves personal...

Featuring the work of Black women poets from Botswana to Brazil, in this collection, we encounter ancestors who made love, just for the sake of love, and women who die with each orgasm while attempting to mark the extent of their own humanities.This is...

Now And Then is not merely a collection of a songwriter's lyrics; the song-poems of this undisputed 'bluesologist' triumphantly stand on their own, evoking the rhythm and urgency which have distinguished Gil Scott-Heron's career. This collection of...

As he did for Black women in Black Roses, Harold Green III, poet and founder of the music collective Flowers for the Living, now honors the Black men he most admires--groundbreakers including Tyler Perry, Barry Jenkins, Billy Porter, Chance the Rapper,...

The following is a small glimpse into her diary: Accounts of Oshun inside our mortal bodies and our experiences. We are as majestic as a goddess. We contain unwavering strength as the waters she commands; An insurmountable loyalty to those we love. And...

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...

Black poets from the early twentieth century and onward come together for a moving anthology, edited and organized by the late, revered poet June Jordan. First published in 1970, soulscript is a poignant, panoramic collection of poetry from some of the...

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...