Rita Dove: The Musical Influence
"I want to believe—and I actually do believe—that I prefer to draw from the past more than break from the past."

Claudia Rankine in Conversation
"I think the great poems for me are ones that take me to a place that I recognize intuitively..."

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

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.

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.

Harryette Mullen
Born in Florence, Alabama and raised in Fort Worth, Texas, Harryette Mullen is the recipient of the 2009 Academy Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement.

James Weldon Johnson
Author of God's Trombones, James Weldon Johnson was also a successful song-writer, foreign diplomat, and national organizer for the NAACP.

Amiri Baraka
A controversial figure because of his out-spoken political views, Amiri Baraka, formerly Leroi Jones, is a prolific poet and playwright who published many of the Beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

Lucille Clifton
Recipient of the National Book Award for poetry, Clifton is also an Emmy-award winner and a former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

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.