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Celebrate and explore the rich tradition of African American poetry through essays on literary milestones, intersections of music, poetry and art, and profiles and poems of historical and contemporary poets who continue to pioneer new ground while keeping an eye on the past.
Featured Video
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
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.
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.
For the Classroom
Lesson Plan: Voice
Students participate in a series of learning activities employing interconnectivity between poems used and core texts to explore poetry as social commentary.
Poetic Forms
Blues Poem A blues poem typically takes on themes such as struggle, despair, and sex.
The Bop Not unlike the Shakespearean sonnet in trajectory, the Bop is a form of poetic argument consisting of three stanzas.
Terrance Hayes
Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Hayes is the recipient of the 2010 National Book Award for his newest collection Lighthead.
Lucille Clifton
Recipient of the 2000 National Book Award for poetry, Clifton is also an Emmy-award winner and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
Jericho Brown
Ilya Kaminsky writes: "Jericho Brown's first book is one of those rare things: a debut of a master poet."
Dawn Lundy Martin
As well as being awarded numerous prizes for her poetry, Martin is also the co-founder of the Third Wave Foundation for social justice.
Featured Poems
The Present Crisis
by James Russell Lowell When a deed is done for Freedom, through the broad earth's aching breast...
Frederick Douglas
by Paul Laurence Dunbar A hush is over all the teeming lists...
America
by Claude McKay Although she feeds me bread of bitterness...
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.
Celebrate and explore the rich tradition of African American poetry through essays on literary milestones, intersections of music, poetry and art, and profiles and poems of historical and contemporary poets who continue to pioneer new ground while keeping an eye on the past. 
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