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The Harlem Renaissance was a watershed moment for racial uplift, poetic innovation, sexual liberation, and female empowerment.Aphrodite's Daughtersintroduces us to three amazing women who were at the forefront of all these developments, poetic iconoclasts who pioneered new and candidly erotic forms of female self-expression. Maureen Honey paints a vivid portrait of three African American women-Angelina Weld Grimké, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, and Mae V. Cowdery-who came from very different backgrounds but converged in late 1920s Harlem to leave a major mark on the literary landscape. She examines the varied ways these poets articulated female sexual desire, ranging from Grimké's invocation of a Sapphic goddess figure to Cowdery's frank depiction of bisexual erotics to Bennett's risky exploration of the borders between sexual pleasure and pain. Yet Honey also considers how they were united in their commitment to the female body as a primary source of meaning, strength, and transcendence. The product of extensive archival research,Aphrodite's Daughtersdraws from Grimké, Bennett, and Cowdery's published and unpublished poetry, along with rare periodicals and biographical materials, to immerse us in the lives of these remarkable women and the world in which they lived. It thus not only shows us how their artistic contributions and cultural interventions were vital to their own era, but also demonstrates how the poetic heart of their work keeps on beating.

Since Martin Luther King Jr.'s \"I Have a Dream\" speech, some scholars have privately suspected that King's \"dream\" was connected to Langston Hughes's poetry. Drawing on archival materials, including notes, correspondence, and marginalia, W. Jason Miller provides a completely original and compelling argument that Hughes's influence on King's rhetoric was, in fact, evident in more than just the one famous speech. King's staff had been wiretapped by J. Edgar Hoover and suffered accusations of communist influence, so quoting or naming the leader of the Harlem Renaissance-who had his own reputation as a communist-would only have intensified the threats against the civil rights activist. Thus, the link was purposefully veiled through careful allusions in King's orations. InOrigins of the Dream, Miller lifts that veil and shows how Hughes's revolutionary poetry became a measurable inflection in King's voice. He contends that by employing Hughes's metaphors in his speeches, King negotiated a political climate that sought to silence the poet's subversive voice. By separating Hughes's identity from his poems, King helped the nation unconsciously embrace the incendiary ideas behind his poetry.

WithPoems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral(1773), Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784) became the first English-speaking person of African descent to publish a book and only the second woman-of any race or background- to do so in America. Written in Boston while she was just a teenager, and when she was still a slave, Wheatley's work was an international sensation. InPhillis Wheatley, Vincent Carretta offers the first full-length biography of a figure whose origins and later life have remained shadowy despite her iconic status. A scholar with extensive knowledge of transatlantic literature and history, Carretta uncovers new details about Wheatley's origins, her upbringing, and how she gained freedom. Carretta solves the mystery of John Peters, correcting the record of when he and Wheatley married and revealing what became of him after her death. Assessing Wheatley's entire body of work, Carretta discusses the likely role she played in the production, market­ing, and distribution of her writing. Wheatley developed a remarkable transatlantic network that transcended racial, class, political, religious, and geographical boundaries. Carretta reconstructs that network and sheds new light on her religious and political identities. In the course of his research he discovered the earliest poem attributable to Wheatley and has included it and other unpublished poems in the biography. Carretta relocates Wheatley from the margins to the center of her eighteenth-century transatlantic world, revealing the fascinating life of a woman who rose from the indignity of enslavement to earn wide recognition, only to die in obscurity a few years later.

Winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize\"Nicole Terez Dutton's fierce and formidable debut throbs with restless beauty and a lyrical undercurrent that is both empowered and unpredictable. Every poem is unsettling in that delicious way that changes and challenges the reader. There is nothing here that does not hurtle forward.\"-Patricia Smith

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry \"The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years.\"--Publishers Weekly \"All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it.\"--Publishers Weekly \"If you only read one poetry book in 2012,The Collected Poems of Lucille Cliftonought to be it.\"-NPR \"The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us.\"--The Washington Post \"The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton-both the woman and her poetry-is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness.\"-Toni Morrison, from the Foreword The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titledthe book of days(2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career. On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose \"lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition,\" and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America. \"mother-tongue: to man-kind\" (from the unpublishedthe book of days): all that I am asking isthat you see me as somethingmore than a common occurrence,more than a woman in her ordinary skin.

This Rebel Girl changed the world with her words. An American writer who dazzled audiences with poems and stories about her life. And helped fight for the rights of Black people. We explore who Maya Angelou was. Based on the best-selling books 'Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls'.

Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor at Harvard University. His books include Colored People, Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man, and In Search of Our Roots. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Malin Pereira's collection of eight interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post-Black Arts Movement generation. This volume includes unpublished interviews Pereira conducted with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, and Elizabeth Alexander, as well as conversations with Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells previously in print. Largely published since 1980, each of these poets has at least four books. Their influence on new generations of poets has been wide-reaching. The work of this group, says Pereira, is a departure from the previous generation's proscriptive manifestos in favor of more inclusive voices, perspectives, and techniques. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific black aesthetic, their work just as effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics. Unlike Amiri Baraka's claim in \"Home\" that he becomes blacker and blacker, positioning race as a defining essence, these poets imagine a plurality of ideas about the relationship between blackness and black poetry. They question the idea of an established literary canon defining black literature. For these poets, Pereira says, the idea of \"home\" is found both in black poetry circles and in the wider transnational community of literature. A Sarah Mills Hodge Foundation Publication.

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry. Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.