"For more than 250 years," writes poet and scholar Kevin Young in his introduction to this landmark new anthology, "African Americans have written and recited and published poetry about beauty and injustice, music and muses, Africa and America, freedoms and foodways, Harlem and history, funk and opera, boredom and longing, jazz and joy." 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 Noise 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.
Only now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the
breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of voices,
some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. With AFRICAN AMERICAN
POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America; October 20, 2020;
978-159853-666-9; $45), a monumental new anthology expertly curated by poet
and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed for the
first time in all its power, beauty. and multiplicity. Here are 675 poems in
all, including many never before anthologized, along with newly researched
biographies of every poet.
Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like
Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an activist like
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery.
Read nuanced. provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion
stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and
beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of
Langston Hughes. Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of
poetic history-in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black
Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective - and the complex bonds of solidarity
and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have
celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in
the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly black music of a
tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip-hop, and the rhythms and cadences of
the pulpit the barbershop. and the street.
Taking the measure of the tradition in a single
authoritative volume, AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
sets a new standard for a deep, authentic engagement with Black poetry and its
essential expression of American genius.
This anthology is the centerpiece of Lift Every Voice: Why
African American Poetry Matters, a yearlong national public humanities
initiative that engages participants in a multifaceted exploration of African
American poetry; with signature events in New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Kansas
City, and Los Angeles, regional programming in public libraries nationwide, as
well as a companion website featuring video readings, commentary, programming
support, and much more. Lift Every Voice is presented in partnership with The
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture with generous support from The
National Endowment for the Humanities, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and
Emerson Collective.
About the editor: Kevin Young is the director of the
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, recently named a National
Historic Landmark, and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He is the author of
thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Brown (Knopf, 2018) as
featured on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah; and Bunk (Graywolf, 2017), which
won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Nonfiction, was longlisted for the
National Book Award. and named a New York Times Notable Book. He is the editor
of nine other volumes, including the Library of America anthology African
American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (2020). He is a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences and was named a Chancellor of the Academy
of American Poets in 2020. He will be the director of the Smithsonian's
National Museum of African American History and Culture starting in January
2021.
AFRICAN AMERICAN POETRY: 250 Years of Struggle & Song
edited by Kevin Young
Library of America; October 20, 2020
978-1-59853-666-9
U.S. $45.00 / Can. $60.00
www.africanamericanpoetry.org
Now in its fourth decade, Library of America is a nonprofit organization that champions the nation's cultural heritage by publishing America's greatest writing in authoritative new editions and providing resources for readers to explore this rich, living legacy.
