In The Vintage Book of African American Poetry, editors Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton present the definitive collection of black verse in the United States--200 years of vision, struggle, power, beauty, and triumph from 52 outstanding poets. From the neoclassical stylings of slave-born Phillis Wheatley to the wistful lyricism of Paul Lawrence Dunbar . . . the rigorous wisdom of Gwendolyn Brooks...the chiseled modernism of Robert Hayden...the extraordinary prosody of Sterling A. Brown...the breathtaking, expansive narratives of Rita Dove...the plaintive rhapsodies of an imprisoned Elderidge Knight . . . The postmodern artistry of Yusef Komunyaka. Here, too, is a landmark exploration of lesser-known artists whose efforts birthed the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts movements--and changed forever our national literature and the course of America itself. Meticulously researched, thoughtfully structured, The Vintage Book of African-American Poetry is a collection of inestimable value to students, educators, and all those interested in the ever-evolving tradition that is American poetry.

Rich selection of 74 poems ranging from religious and moral verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters (ca. 1753–1784) to 20th-century work of Countee Cullen, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes. Introduction.

A Cross-Generational Anthology of Contemporary African-American Poetry

Discover the voices of a culture from legendary New York Timesbestselling author Nikki Giovanni HEAR: Langston Hughes Gwendolyn Brooks Countee Cullen Paul Laurence Dunbar Robert Hayden Etheridge Knight READ: Rita Dove Sonia Sanchez Richard Wright Tupac Shukar Lucille Clifton Mari Evans Kevin Young Including one audio CD featuring many of the poems read by the poets themselves, 100 Best African-American Poems is at once strikingly original and a perfect fit for the original poetry anthologies from Sourcebooks, including Poetry Speaks, The Spoken Word Revolution, Poetry Speaks to Children, and the Nikki Giovanni-edited Hip Hop Speaks to Children. Award-winning poet and writer Nikki Giovanni takes on the difficult task of selecting the 100 best African-American works from classic and contemporary poets. This startlingly vibrant collection spans from historic to modern, from structured to free-form, and reflects the rich roots and visionary future of African-American verse in American culture. The resulting selections prove to be an exciting mix of most-loved chestnuts and daring new writing. Most of all, the voice of a culture comes through in this collection, one that is as talented, diverse, and varied as its people.

A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present Across a turbulent history, from such vital centers as Harlem, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, and the Bay Area, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. Capturing the power and beauty of this diverse tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry reveals as never before its centrality and its challenge to American poetry and culture. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people like Phillis Wheatley and George Moses Horton and activist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voice their passionate resistance to slavery. Young’s fresh, revelatory presentation of the Harlem Renaissance reexamines the achievements of Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen alongside works by lesser-known poets such as Gwendolyn B. Bennett and Mae V. Cowdery. The later flowering of the still influential Black Arts Movement is represented here with breadth and originality, including many long out-of-print or hard-to-find poems. Here are all the significant movements and currents: the nineteenth-century Francophone poets known as Les Cenelles, the Chicago Renaissance that flourished around Gwendolyn Brooks, the early 1960s Umbra group, and the more recent work of writers affiliated with Cave Canem and the Dark Room Collective. Here too are poems of singular, hard-to-classify figures: the enslaved potter David Drake, the allusive modernist Melvin B. Tolson, the Cleveland-based experimentalist Russell Atkins. This Library of America volume also features biographies of each poet and notes that illuminate cultural references and allusions to historical events.

Presents a diverse sample of twentieth century Latin American poems from eighty-four authors in Spanish, Portuguese, Ladino, Spanglish, and several indigenous languages with English translations on facing pages.

"The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall