Vintage Book of African American Poetry  
A vast narration of struggle, love, race, and redemption through the work of fifty poets.

The Bean Eaters
by Gwendolyn Brooks
Written during the early years of the Civil Rights movement, during which the Brooks's interest in social issues deepened and found expression in her work.

American Journal
by Robert Hayden
Hayden's poems, with their expansive connotations, transcend sociological definition. They are irreducible in their themes...

The Weary Blues
by Langston Hughes
The poems progress at a self-assured and lyrical pace—partly because Hughes expected them to be performed with musical accompaniment in the famous Harlem clubs of that era.

Toi Derricotte
Together with Cornelius Eady, she co-founded the Cave Canem Foundation, a workshop retreat for black poets, in 1996.

Claude McKay
At the age of twenty, McKay published a book of verse called Songs of Jamaica, recording his impressions of black life in Jamaica in dialect, and his various poetic achievements helped set the tone for the Harlem Renaissance.

Marilyn Nelson
Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Nelson served as the Poet Laureate of Connecticut from 2001-2006.

Claudia Rankine
A recipient of the 2005 Academy of American Poets Fellowship, Rankine is currently the Henry G. Lee Professor of English at Pomona College.

Harlem Renaissance
No place embodied the new aesthetic more than Harlem, home to a thriving artistic scene of literary magazines like The Crisis, cafes, jazz clubs, and scores of reading venues.

Negritude
The movement is marked by its rejection of European colonization and its role in the African diaspora.

Black Arts
Artists within the movement sought to create politically engaged work that explored the African American cultural and historical experience.

Jazz Poetry
Writing about jazz poetry is, as they say, like dancing about architecture.

Slam
Often highly politicized, drawing upon racial, economic, and gender injustices as well as current events for subject manner.

Dark Room Collective
It was the sustaining practice of writing in community just as much as the activism of building a community-based reading series for writers of color.

Rita Dove: On Post-Racial Literature
"We haven't had the conversations we need to have about race and privilege...We're starting, so we're on our way."

Claudia Rankine: Situation One
A video-poem exploring the racial politics of Zinedine Zidane's notorious head-butt at the 2006 World Cup

From the White House: Poetry, Music & the Spoken Word
"What happens to the ones forgotten...?"

Women of the Harlem Renaissance
by Anthony Walton
In the time of the Harlem Renaissance, race and gender often hindered the building of artistic careers.

Tracy K. Smith in Conversation
Known for the mysterious but utterly lucid quality of her poems, Smith writes a history that is sub-rosa yet fully within her vision.

Sekou Sundiata: Defying Labels
Blues, jazz, funk, and Afro-Caribbean percussion surround the soulful voice of Harlem-born poet Sekou Sundiata on his recordings, The Blue Oneness of Dreams and Longstoryshort.

On Black Male Poetics
by Afaa M. Weaver
Despite their different choices, Hughes and Hayden had one thing in common. They loved living the life of the poet.