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Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Imagine Being More Afraid of Freedom than Slavery tackles both personal and contemporary issues of enslavement, sexuality, emotional trauma, and physical abuse. From beginning to end, these poems chart the journey that is life and one woman's escape from the cycle of dependency as she recovers her lost identity. Thematically, they are bound by a writer's search for love and freedom, drawing on the spirit and will of Harriet Tubman, the image of Emmett...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Buffalo. A father's funeral. Memory. In Generations, Louise Clifton's formidable poetic gift emerges in prose, giving us a memoir of stark and profound beauty. Her story focuses on the lives of the Sayles family: Caroline, "born among the Dahomey people in 1822," who walked north from New Orleans to Virginia in 1830 when she was eight years old; Lucy, the first black woman to be hanged in Virginia; and Gene, born with a withered arm, the son of a...
Author
Language
English
Description
"This biography explores the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a major nineteenth-century American poet and one of the first African American writers to garner international attention and praise in the wake of emancipation. While Dunbar is perhaps best known for poems such as "Sympathy" (a poem that ends "I know why the caged bird sings!") and "We Wear the Mask," he wrote prolifically in many genres, including a newspaper he produced with...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
While competing with Langston Hughes for the title of "Poet Laureate of Harlem," Countée Cullen (1903–46) crafted poems that became touchstones for American readers, both black and white. Inspired by classic themes and working within traditional forms, Cullen shaped his poetry to address universal questions like love, death, longing, and loss while also dealing with the issues of race and idealism that permeated the national conversation. Drawing...
11) And still I rise
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
[1978]
Language
English
Description
"Maya Angelou's third poetry collection, a unique celebration of life, consists of rhythms of strength, love, and remembrance, songs of the street, and lyrics of the heart." --
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
George loved words. Enslaved and forced to work long hours, he was unable to attend school or learn how to read.
But he was determined―he listened to the white children's lessons and learned the alphabet. Then he taught himself to read.
Soon, he began composing poetry in his head and reciting it aloud as he sold fruits and vegetables on a nearby college campus. News of the enslaved poet traveled quickly among the students, and...
But he was determined―he listened to the white children's lessons and learned the alphabet. Then he taught himself to read.
Soon, he began composing poetry in his head and reciting it aloud as he sold fruits and vegetables on a nearby college campus. News of the enslaved poet traveled quickly among the students, and...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Mary-Alice Daniel's family moved from West Africa to England when she was a very young girl, leaving behind the vivid culture of her native land in the Nigerian savanna. They arrived to a blanched, cold world of prim suburbs and unfamiliar customs. So began her family's series of travels across three continents in search of places of belonging. A Coastline Is an Immeasurable Thing ventures through the physical and mythical landscapes of Daniel's...
Author
Pub. Date
2017.
Language
English
Formats
Description
""The self-described black feminist lesbian mother poet used a mixture of prose, theory, poetry, and experience to interrogate oppressions and uplift marginalized communities. She was one of the first black feminists to target heteronormativity, and to encourage black feminists to expand their understanding of erotic pleasure. She amplified anti-oppression, even as breast cancer ravaged her ailing body."--Evette Dionne, Bustle Magazine Winner of the...
15) Langston Hughes
Author
Publisher
Millbrook Press
Pub. Date
[1997]
Language
English
Description
Tells the story of a leading poet of the Harlem Renaissance during the 1920s who devoted his life to writing about the black experience in America.
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
Introduction by Arnold Rampersad.
Langston Hughes, born in 1902, came of age early in the 1920s. In The Big Sea he recounts those memorable years in the two great playgrounds of the decade--Harlem and Paris. In Paris he was a cook and waiter in nightclubs. He knew the musicians and dancers, the drunks and dope fiends. In Harlem he was a rising young poet--at the center of the "Harlem Renaissance."
Arnold Rampersad writes in his incisive new introduction...
Author
Publisher
Kokila
Pub. Date
2024.
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"When Walela is diagnosed at twenty-three with advanced stage blood cancer, they're suddenly thrust into the unsympathetic world of tubes and pills, doctors who don't use their correct pronouns, and hordes of 'well-meaning' but patronizing people offering unsolicited advice as they navigate rocky personal relationships and share their story online. But this experience also deepens their relationship to their ancestors, providing added support from...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
With Soldier, world-renowned poet June Jordan presents a deeply personal memoir of her formative years in post-World War II Harlem, where she was raised the daughter of dirt-poor West Indian immigrants. June's first 12 years were at turns peaceful and tumultuous, sowing all the seeds of her later poetry.
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