Black Studies: Poetry, Anthologies

The Vintage Book of African American Poetry by Anthony Walton (Editor); Michael S. Harper (Editor) An anthology representing more than two hundred years of African American creative poetic endeavors features the work of fifty-two poets.

Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry by Camille T. Dungy (Editor) This book is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated. Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry, anything but nature poetry.

3000 Years of Black Poetry by Alan Lomax and Raoul Abdul Includes roots of black poetry in Africa, from primitive song, and extends to Egypt, Latin America, the West Indies, and America.

The Poetry of Black America: Anthology of the 20th Century by Arnold Adoff (Editor); Gwendolyn Brooks (Introduction by) In 600 poems by 145 authors, this book gives a cross-section of black American poetry writing in the twentieth century.

I Am the Darker Brother: an Anthology of Modern Poems by African Americans by Arnold Adoff; Benny Andrews (Illustrator) A collection of African-American poetry is specifically created for young readers and includes a foreword by Nikki Giovanni and contributions by such prominent writers as Langston Hughes and Maya Angelou.

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America by Aldon Lynn Nielsen (Editor) What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fascinating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted noncanonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry.

Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans by Aldon Lynn Nielsen (Editor); Lauri Ramey (Editor) Showcases brilliant and experimental work in African American poetry. Just prior to the Second World War, and even more explosively in the 1950s and 1960s, a far-reaching revolution in aesthetics and prosody by black poets ensued, some working independently and others in organized groups.

In Our Own Tongues: Poetic Voices of Three Generations of African-American Women by Fabu Madison In Our Own Tongues gives poetic voice to three generations of African-American women. It celebrates how Black women speak and do in the ways best known to them. This powerful and healing collection of poetry touches on a variety of experiences in the United States regarding emotional abuse, physical and sexual assaults, racism, lynchings, political issues as well as the permeating smell of magnolias.

The Jazz Poetry Anthology by Sascha Feinstein (Editor); Yusef Komunyakaa (Editor) The poems here cover the range of jazz itself: from early blues to free jazz and experimental music. This anthology represents the broad appreciation for jazz as poetic inspiration, not only from the Beat movement but from writers across the decades and around the world.

From the Ashes: Voices of Watts by Budd Schulberg, editor Selected writings, including autobiographical essays, poems and stories, by eighteen contributors to the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in South Los Angeles after the riots of 1965.

We Speak As Liberators: Young Black Poets, an Anthology by Orde Coombs (Editor)

Soulscript: Afro American Poetry by June Jordan (Editor)