Poetry

By: Daniel Donaghy

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Poetry

Despite popular belief, the African American literary tradition did not begin in 1773, when Phillis Wheatley, a well-educated slave, published a poetry collection entitled Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Rather, it began a year earlier, when Wheatley, who was able to translate Ovid's tales from Latin by age ten, was called before a group of eighteen Boston aristocrats to prove that she had written the book. No transcript of the meeting was taken, so scholars can only speculate that Wheatley was asked about the book's various Greek and Latin allusions and the obvious influences of Milton and Pope. She was certainly confronted with the collective skepticism about her ability to craft such accomplished poems. Whatever she said, it convinced the panel to draft and sign a two-paragraph “Attestation” as well as an open letter to readers of Wheatley's book, “To the Publick,” that reads in part: “We whose Names are under-written, do assure the World, that the Poems specified in the following Page, were (as we verily believe) written by Phillis, a young Negro girl…She has been examined by some of the best Judges, and is thought qualified to write them.”

And so began the practice, which would continue for more than a century, of established white people (usually editors) including prefatory material at the beginning of books written by African Americans. Such prefaces and letters, which testified to the author's intelligence, trustworthiness, and generally good character, would accompany the publication of books ranging from poetry collections to novels and from short story collections to fugitive slave narratives. It is important to note that African American literature found its first publishing home not in the United States, but in London, where John Wheatley had taken his slave Phillis to recuperate from an illness and where the Countess of Huntington (to whom the book is dedicated) and the Earl of Dartmouth, convinced by the prefatory information, aided Phillis and her master in securing a publisher. Phillis and her master's son, Nathaniel Wheatley, had tried a year before to find Boston publisher for a similar collection, but, without the judges' comments, no one believed her capable of writing the poems.

“A Poem” by Phillis Wheatley, cover. This work, published in 1770, was widely printed in broadside in America and Britain and is Wheatley's most famous elegy.

Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

view larger image

Wheatley's poems rely on the conventions she learned from classic literature. They address “proper” poetic subjects such as “Imagination,” allude to Greek and Roman mythology, and include invocations to the muse. In addition, they contain a consistent meter (usually iambic pentameter), rhyming couplets, personification, and epigrams, and were often written for and dedicated to prominent citizens like George Washington and leading business and religious leaders. Many critics are quick to point out that Wheatley was not simply a mimic, but rather an intelligent poet who used neoclassical conventions because they suited her purposes. In the words of Erlene Stetson, editor of the important anthology Black Sister: Poetry by Black American Women 1746–1980, “the strength of her poetics lies in the mastery, skill, perception, and black female consciousness that she fuses with these conventional models.”

Many of Wheatley's strongest poems are about the illness, death, and dying that were such a part of women's lives at the time she was writing. Wheatley was often inspired by the deaths of women and children, and she paid particular attention to the suffering of mothers. These poems examine the overwhelming sense of loss that accompanies death and address the personal struggles that women were forced to endure alone. She often writes for and to her white patrons in such poems. Stetson interprets Wheatley's poetic stance in such pieces as “characteristically deferential[. S]he insisted on observing the proper social distance between herself and her masters. She accepted the world of masters and servants and acted according to the accepted code that demanded that she be ‘humble, modest, wise.’” Wheatley was criticized and even dismissed as a literary figure by some in subsequent generations of African American poets (especially poets of the Black Arts Movement) for the absence of social protest in her work. Others, however, such as Elaine Stetson and Henry Louis Gates Jr., see Wheatley as an African American icon, a literary and historical matriarch.

Gates sees Wheatley's oral examination as part of a larger reexamination of sixteenth-century assumptions. Since at least that time, Europeans had been unsure whether or not the “African species of man” could ever “master the arts and sciences.” If they could, according to the argument, then Africans were fundamentally related to Europeans. If not, then Africans seemed destined to be slaves. This was the burden that Wheatley carried into the meeting. Gates sees her successful defense as the launching point for two literary traditions at once: the African American literary tradition and the African American woman's literary tradition. In his view, Phillis Wheatley's struggle to get published and find an audience, and the subsequent indifference she received from patrons and acquaintances after returning from England, is the history of African American literature and literary criticism.

Early African American writers seemed keenly aware of Wheatley's importance. Jupiter Hammon, for example, author of the first poem (“An Evening Thought. Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries”) published by an African American, acknowledged her influence by making her the subject of his 1778 broadside “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly [sic], Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston.” Also, George Horton, the second African American to publish a book of poetry in English—a startling fifty-six years after Wheatley—published an 1838 edition of his 1829 collection The Hope of Liberty, bound with Wheatley's.

While Wheatley was the first African American poet to publish an entire volume, she was not the first to be recognized as a poet. That honor belongs to then-sixteen-year-old Lucy Terry (1730–1821), of Deerfield, Massachusetts, who in 1746 wrote “Bars Fight, August 28, 1746.” Her poem chronicles a Native American raid on a camp of white settlers. In the poem, she takes a decidedly pro-settler stance, casting most, but not all of them in a positive light: one man was killed after fighting “like a hero”; one woman was “tommyhawked…on her head” as she tried to flee; another man “fled across the water” and escaped; yet another was “taken and carried to Canada.” While Terry's poem is far less refined and technically accomplished than any of Wheatley's, it is far more overtly intense and emotional.

In Wheatley's Shadow: Nineteenth-Century African American Women's Poetry

One poet who is perhaps more important historically than artistically is Ann Plato. Little is known about her; historians are certain only, through the records of the Reverend J. W. C. Pennington, that she was a member of the Colored Congregational Church of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1841 and that she put together the wide-ranging Essays; Including Biographies and Miscellaneous Pieces, in Prose and Poetry (Hartford, 1841), which, after Wheatley's collection, was one of the first books by an African American woman. While no definitive conclusion has yet been reached, scholars believe that Plato was relatively young when she wrote her book. Her age has been offered as an excuse, in fact, for some of the book's shortcomings: it is at times excessively sentimental and melodramatic, and it is cluttered with forced rhymes, missed rhymes, misspellings, and punctuation errors. Another important characteristic of the book is that it deals very little with complex issues such as race. In fact, only one of the twenty poems in the book addresses slavery. “To the First of August” celebrates the 1 August 1838 abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. Another, “The Natives of America,” shows a father telling his child about the mistreatment of Native Americans. The majority of the book's poetry superficially addresses situations such as visiting a grave (“Reflections, Written on Visiting the Grave of a Venerated Friend”) and talking in syrupy, gushing terms to one's love (“Forget Me Not”).

Another important literary figure in nineteenth-century African American women's poetry is H.(enrietta) Cordelia Ray (1850–1916). One of two daughters born to the distinguished minister and abolitionist, Charles B. Ray, she was raised in New York City and received an exceptional education, graduating from New York University with a degree in Pedagogy and from the Sauveueur School of Languages, where she became fluent in Greek, Latin, French, and German in addition to developing into an English scholar. After completing her education, Ray became a teacher at grammar school No. 80. She quickly grew bored there, though, and quit, dedicating most of the rest of her life to tending to her physically challenged older sister, Florence; tutoring in music, mathematics, and languages; teaching literature classes to teachers; and supporting her father's antislavery work. Her debut as a poet occurred at the dedication of the Freedman's Monument, a sculpture unveiled by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1876, when a reading of her “Commemoration Ode on Lincoln/written for the occasion of the unveiling of the Freedman's monument/in Memory of Abraham Lincoln/April 14, 1876” was part of the ceremony. (The poem was eventually published in 1893.) Ray's academic background led her toward an intellectual writing style that tended to emphasize technique and form over emotion. Some of her more accomplished poems were inspired by historical and literary figures: “Oedipus and Antigone,” “Milton,” “Shakespeare,” and “Robert G. Shaw.” Her other published works include Sonnets (New York, 1893); Poems (1887); and, with her sister, Sketch of the Life of Rev. Charles B. Ray (New York, 1887).

After Phillis Wheatley, Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) is perhaps the most important nineteenth-century African American female poet. She was a novelist in addition to being a poet; her novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892), was thought to be the first by an African American woman until Henry Louis Gates discovered Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig. Harper's poems, which are usually narratives, are rooted in religion and the struggle against racism and gender discrimination. The tone of her poems ranges from furious to sentimental to humorous. Her subjects range, too, as exemplified by the following list: “A Grain of Sand,” “Mary at the Feet of Christ,” “A Mother's Blessing,” “The Dying Bondsman,” “The Sparrow's Fall,” “Dandelions,” “The Hermit's Sacrifice,” “The Slave Auction,” and “The Dying Mother.”

In contrast to Wheatley, Harper wrote much of her poetry about the lower classes. She attacked the institution of slavery and upbraided white Christians who failed to show charity toward African Americans. As Frederick Douglass does brilliantly in the Appendix to his 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Harper often points out, in poems such as “Simon's Countrymen,” the hypocrisy implicit within a societal structure that embraces both Christianity and slavery. Harper's passion emanated from her faith. Religion not only gave Harper the moral basis for her position, but also offered her images of hope. By adapting stories and parables from the Bible to address her audiences, Harper found a way to get through to African Americans who may have been illiterate, but who may have heard such stories growing up.

In addition, Harper fought for the rights of women to disregard unfair laws. Poems such as “Vashti” and books such as Moses: A Story of the Nile (1869), celebrate brave, strong women who face banishment rather than submit to the authority of unjust men. Harper also used the metaphor of the flower to exemplify the female condition. In “The Crocuses” and “The Mission of the Flowers,” Harper praises the beauty, strength, and determination of African American women. Furthermore, Harper wrote a variety of other kinds of poems, including odes, lyrics, and eulogies. Sketches of Southern Life (1872) even contains several narrative poems written in dialect, in which Harper uses humor and irony to address subjects close to her heart: suffrage and slavery.

While Wheatley and Harper have long been fixtures in the African American literary canon, many African American woman poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have gone unrecognized because they could not find book publishers during their lifetimes. As a result, their work was forgotten until a resurgence in African American Studies has led historians and literary scholars to search through diaries, letters, and journals on a quest for un- or underappreciated writers. One woman who has Charlotte Forten [Grimké] (1837–1914). In what is the earliest known journal kept by an African American woman, Forten wrote an entry on 28 June 1854, in which she writes admiringly of Phillis Wheatley. Other African American women published anonymously or under a pen name. For example, anti-slavery poems by “Ada” appeared regularly in William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, between 1836 and 1855. Later revealed to be a woman named Sarah Louisa Forten, “Ada” was known only as “a young and intelligent lady of color” and was reportedly from Philadelphia. Little else is known of her. Learning much more about such writers isfurther complicated by the fact that these women published in periodicals with very small circulations—religious pamphlets, temperance and antislavery magazines, African American newspapers, and then-popular journals and weeklies—including A.M.E. Church Review, Anglo-American, Women's Era, Atlantic Monthly, Golden Days, Ringwood's Magazine, Free Speech (edited by Ida B. Wells), Woman's Light and Love, Waverly Magazine, the Boston Herald, and the Philadelphia Press. Most of the records and much of the poetry published in these small journals, which were among the few publications who accepted poetry by African American women, have unfortunately been lost. Aside from the single volume by Wheatley and a few others by Harper, there were no book-length collections of poems by an African American woman published in the United States before 1890.

The dearth of poetry collections had nothing to do with a lack of intellect, imagination, or energy among black women. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African American writers—both male and female—struggled to be recognized as artists. Most did not yet have the societal or economic resources to publish their own work or the work of other African American writers. Furthermore, their paths toward publication were blocked by the business interests of the publishing industry. Books by African American women had no track record: none had ever sold well, so publishers did not want to risk investing in an unproven commodity. Refusing to publish works by African American women guaranteed, of course, that such writers remained unpublished, obscure, and, in effect, voiceless. The political climate of the writer–publisher relationship would be one of the key issues in such important twentieth-century literary movements as the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Arts Movement.

African American Women's Poetry of The Harlem Renaissance

Also known as the New Negro Movement, the New Negro Renaissance, and the Negro Renaissance, the Harlem Renaissance began roughly at the end of World War I, peaked in the mid-1920s, and ended in the middle of the 1930s. During that time, African Americans migrated in unprecedented numbers from the South to the North, fleeing oppressive working conditions and hoping to capitalize on the increased opportunities created by World War I in cities such as Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, and New York City. This demographic shift, known as “The Great Migration,” brought African Americans together in concentrated areas and led to new political, intellectual, and artistic possibilities. Moving to the North did not eliminate racial tension, however. During this time, African Americans frequently found themselves threatened in both the North and the South. In 1919 alone, African Americans were attacked in twenty-five cities and seventy people were lynched, with fourteen burned alive. The Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915, was gaining strength, D. W. Griffith had just filmed Birth of a Nation, and the racist parodying of African American culture, the blackface minstrel show, was the hit of vaudeville. In the midst of this climate, Harlem emerged as a mecca of African American culture and thought. Writers such as Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, and Claude McKay formed what would become known as the “bumper crop” of Harlem Renaissance artists. This generation of writers sought, in a variety of styles, to empower themselves and their race by creating work that speaks to various aspects of the African American condition. While the Harlem Renaissance was primarily a literary movement, it was part of a larger transformation of African American thought that included the fields of music, photography, painting, theater, and politics.

In recent years, the female poets of the Harlem Renaissance have received increased attention. Originally dismissed by many critics as capable of writing only in anachronistic styles and about hackneyed subjects, writers such as Georgia Douglas Johnson, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Virginia Houston are now appreciated for their use of metaphor and development of themes of great significance to women, such as family, nature, heritage, protest, and intellectual as well as sexual liberation.

Georgia Douglas Johnson (1886–1966) was born in Atlanta and educated at Atlanta University and Oberlin Conservatory in Ohio. Also a playwright, fiction writer, songwriter, and journalist, she was the best-known African American woman poet between Frances E. W. Harper, whose last book of poems was published in 1872, and Margaret Walker, whose first collection was published in 1942. Johnson, who once had aspirations of being a composer, wrote four volumes of poetry. Three of her books were modeled on the sonata form, which she saw as a perfect vehicle through with to show the close relationship between poetry and music. Her first volume, The Heart of a Woman (1918), is a personal collection that connects springtime to a young woman's emerging sense of self. Then came Bronze (1922), which looks at the struggles and triumphs associated with womanhood. Next, the poems of An Autumn Love Cycle (1928) present the speaker as an older woman who looks back at her life after “love's triumphant day is done.” Each volume includes many references to stringed instruments and represents different aspects of the sonata form, serving respectively as beginning, development, and resolution. Her fourth book, Share My World, appeared in 1962.

Johnson's good friend, Jessie Redmon Fauset (1882–1961), was credited with midwifing the Harlem Renaissance through her discovery of several major poets, including Langston Hughes, during her tenure as literary editor of W. E. B. Du Bois's journal, The Crisis. Her work as an editor shaped her professional and social life, but Fauset saw herself first as a writer. In addition to important poems such as “Oriflamme,” “Stars in Alabama,” and “Fragment,” she wrote four novels, most famously There Is Confusion (1924), which offered a glimpse of middle-class African American life from a female perspective. She and Johnson mentored a new generation of African American writers, both men and women, in addition to making significant contributions to the African American canon through their own writing.

Angelina Weld Grimké (1880–1958) was born in Boston, the only child of a freed slave and a Harvard Law School graduate, Archibald Henry Grimké, and a wealthy white woman, Sarah Stanley, who left the family when Angelina was very young. Her father was the nephew of the famous Grimké sisters from South Carolina. As a result of her close relationship with them, she became involved with progressive issues at a young age. In addition to poetry, she wrote stories and plays, including Rachel, an outstanding, powerful drama about a woman's struggle for an individual identity in the early twentieth century. Never married, she lived alone after her father's death, after which she did not continue her writing career. Her love poems to other women have been praised in recent years as groundbreaking and technically accomplished works of early lesbian writing.

Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935), born in New Orleans to a seamstress and a merchant marine, was a teacher, suffragist, fiction writer, and journalist in addition to being a poet. She was very well educated, having attended Straight, Cornell, and Columbia Universities, in addition to the University of Pennsylvania. She lived in Washington, DC, during a brief marriage to one of the most influential African American writers of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, Paul Laurence Dunbar. When their marriage ended, she moved to Wilmington, Delaware, where she married Robert Nelson, a journalist, with whom she published The Wilmington Advocate from 1920 to 1922. She also became active in women's political issues and worked as a suffrage organizer in the mid-Atlantic region and was active in the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). While she published poems only in periodicals during her lifetime, she was the earliest of the women of the Harlem Renaissance to publish works of fiction, producing Violets and Other Tales at age twenty in 1894 and another collection of short stories, The Goodness of St. Rocque and Other Stories, in 1899. Give Us This Day: The Diary of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, edited by Gloria Hull, was published in 1984.

Anne Spencer (1882–1975) had to overcome a tumultuous childhood before her career as a writer could get started. She was born on a Virginia plantation and lived with her parents in Martinsville, Virginia, where her father was a bar owner, until her mother and she ran away, living briefly in various places before settling in Bramwell, West Virginia, a predominantly white community, where her mother worked as a cook. While Spencer did not go to school until age eleven, she flourished in heryoung adulthood after she and her mother moved again—this time to Lynchburg, Virginia, where Anne attended the Virginia Seminary—with Edward Spencer, a postal worker. With her mother looking after the house, Anne was able to dedicate her life to reading, writing, and talking with the most prominent writers and artists of her day. She found a mentor in James Weldon Johnson, a key political and literary figure in the Harlem Renaissance, who helped Spencer publish her poems and introduced her to well-known writers. Spencer made a novel decision in 1931—one that previous generations of African American women writers were in no position to make: she decided to stop publishing. She lived forty-four more years and did not change her mind: after 1931, she did not publish another book. She did not stop working, though. She kept writing until her death at age ninety-three.

Gwendolyn B. Bennett (1902–1981) lived, after her parents' separation, primarily with her father. Raised in Nevada and Washington, DC, she went to high school in Brooklyn, then attended the School of Fine Arts at Columbia University before she graduated from Pratt Institute in 1924. Soon afterward, Bennett began a promising career in academe when she was hired as an assistant professor of art by Howard University, where she taught design, watercolor, and crafts. When she won a fellowship to study painting in Paris in 1925, Howard agreed to hold her position. Around this time, she became an assistant editor for Charles S. Johnson's Opportunity, for which she wrote a column entitled “Ebony Flute”; she also collaborated with close friends Wallace Thurman, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglass, Richard Bruce, and John Davis in publishing Fire!!, “A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists.” Unfortunately, they were unable to obtain sponsors and published only one issue. Although she never published a book of her own poetry, Bennett firmly establish herself as a poet during the Harlem Renaissance. Her poems appeared regularly in The Crisis, Opportunity, American Mercury, Howard University Record, and Southern Workman; they were also reprinted in some of the most popular anthologies of the time, including Caroling Dusk, edited by Countee Cullen, Ebony and Topaz, edited by Charles S. Johnson, and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of American Verse for 1927. Her college teaching career came to a premature end when Howard fired her in 1927 for marrying a medical student. The couple left Washington, DC, for Florida, where Bennett taught high school, and later moved to Long Island. She gave up on her career as an artist after her husband died and in 1935 moved to Harlem, where she worked as assistant to the director Augusta Savage in the Harlem Community Art Center. Bennett remarried in 1940. She retired in 1968 to bucolic Kutztown, Pennsylvania, where she spent her remaining years running an antiques shop with her husband.

Helene Johnson (1906–1995), a socialite, was well known in New York and Boston literary circles in the 1920s and 30s. A member of the Boston Quill Club, she was published in nearly every major journal and anthology of her day. Poems such as “Sonnet to a Negro in Harlem,” “A Missionary Brings a Young Native to America,” and “A Southern Road” show an impressive command of form and idiom and stand as some of the most beautiful imagistic verse of the Harlem Renaissance. Like several female poets of the Harlem Renaissance, Johnson's publication record ends abruptly; in Johnson's case, the poem “Let Me Sing My Song” in the May 1935 issue of Challenge, a Boston journal edited by Dorothy West was her final published work. Around the time of that poem's appearance, family considerations took precedence. During the 1940s and 1950s, she worked as a correspondent for Consumers Union in Mount Vernon, New York. With the exception of a short stay in Onset, Massachusetts, she spent the rest of her life with her family in New York City.

A native Philadelphian, Mae V. Cowdery (1909–1953) was raised in a comfortable middle class home. As a senior at the Philadelphia High School for Girls (a school also attended by Jessie Fauset) in 1927, she won first prize in a poetry contest run by The Crisis, as well as the Krigwa Poetry Prize for another poem. After graduation, she, like Gwendolyn B. Bennett, attended Pratt Institute. She quickly took to New York City and enjoyed Harlem and Greenwich Village cabarets. Cowdery was one of the few women of her time to publish a book of her own poems, We Lift Our Voices and Other Poems (1936). Despite early success and earning the respect of some of the most influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance, Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, Cowdery fell silent after the book's publication. Her final years are shrouded in mystery. She took her own life at the age of forty-four.

A number of factors contributed to the end of the Harlem Renaissance in the mid-1930s. First, the Great Depression was especially hard on African American communities. Second, organizations such as the NAACP and the Urban League shifted their interests away from artistic concerns toward economic and social ones. Along with the lack of organized support, Harlem Renaissance leaders such as James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Charles S. Johnson, and W. E. B. Du Bois left Harlem to pursue varied interests elsewhere. Perhaps most devastating was the Harlem Riot of 1935, which was set off by frustrations with an economic structure—white owners serving black neighborhoods—that limited the access of African Americans to positions of financial independence within their own communities. Still, the creative energy swirling in Harlem throughout the Renaissance did not die. Roughly one-third of the books published during the Renaissance were published after the stock market crash of 1929. In the end, though, most who had gathered there either left or stopped writing. The Harlem Renaissance changed the landscape of African American art and literature. Because it had no one agenda other than to celebrate the artistic and intellectual capabilities of African Americans, the Harlem Renaissance left a panoply of styles, subjects, and themes from which subsequent generations of artists, both inside and outside the United States, could draw inspiration.

African American Women's Poetry after the Harlem Renaissance

The Harlem Renaissance served as proof that the white race did not own the fields of literature, politics, and art. Whatever subsequent generations of African American writers, artists, and activists (such as those involved in the Black Arts Movement) may point out as shortcomings within the Harlem Renaissance, they must acknowledge that the Renaissance offered a new range of possibilities, a multitude of voices that had previously been rendered silent. It picked up an artistic dialogue—a response to a call—that began with the precocious poems of Phillis Wheatley and continued through poems and slave narratives of the eighteenth century. It continued with the work of writers such as Richard Wright in the late 1930s and the 1940s and with Ralph Ellison in the early 1950s.

It had a particularly liberating effect on African American women writers, who now worked not from a tradition of slavery followed by servile domesticity, but from one in which women sought to reexamine and affirm in new ways the African American female experience. It is not a coincidence that the longest, most varied, and most successful careers for African American women poets began in the decades after the Harlem Renaissance and, in many cases, continued until or beyond the end of the millennium. The Harlem Renaissance set the stage for powerful literary and cultural figures such as Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, and Lucille Clifton and for award-winning and best-selling novelists such as Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, who have routinely drawn inspiration from the work of Harlem Renaissance writers and artists.

Margaret Abigail Walker (1915–1998) was born in Birmingham, Alabama, the daughter of a Methodist minister. She graduated from Northwestern University in 1935 and earned a graduate degree from the University of Iowa, where she submitted a collection of poems for her master's thesis, and Jubilee, a historical novel set around the time of the Civil War, for her doctorate. Both books were eventually published. She is best known for For My People (1942), winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition, which includes poems that address issues such as race and family pride, personal struggles, and which express interests in Africa and Negro folklore. While much of her work—especially poems such as “For My People” “Molly Means,” and “Lineage”—has been praised for its honesty, clarity, directness, and intensity, some of it has been criticized for being too direct and for having a racial consciousness so pronounced that it overshadows the effectiveness of the poems as works of art.

In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks (1917–2000) became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Annie Allen (1949). Although born in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks was raised in Chicago, where she completed her formal education at Wilson Junior College. She was a housewife for many years before she took teaching positions at several colleges in Chicago and at the University of Wisconsin. Brooks's first volume, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945. Subsequent books include Maud Martha (1953), a poetic novel about an African American girl's coming of age, Bronzeville Boys and Girls (poems for children, 1956), The Bean Eaters (1960), Selected Poems (1963), and In the Mecca (1963).

Gwendolyn Brooks earned praise for her poetic brilliance and for her revelations of African American life. She often wrote about “Bronzeville,” an appellation for the predominantly African American South Side of Chicago. She wrote some of the most powerful poems of the twentieth century about the African American condition—including “To DeWitt Clinton in His Way to Lincoln Cemetery,” “A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Burns Bacon,” “Winnie,” and “To an Old Black Woman, Homeless and Indistinct”—as well as a number of equally remarkable poems that do not directly address race, such as “We Real Cool,” “The Mother,” “Boy Breaking Glass,” and “The Lovers of the Poor.” Revealing influences spanning from Dickinson, Robinson, and Frost to Dunbar, Cullen, and Melvin Tolson, she successfully used all of the traditional forms of short poetry as well as free verse. In the words of Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, editors of Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African-Americans Since 1945 (1994), “Taken as a whole, Mrs. Brooks's poems represent a long novel of the experiences of African Americans in Chicago, Russian in scope, emotion and complexity, American and modern, even cubist at times, in their compression and technical wizardry.”

Margaret Danner (1915– ), like Gwendolyn Brooks, lived in Chicago for most of her life. She was educated at Loyola and Roosevelt Universities and was once an assistant editor of Poetry, arguably the most influential poetry journal of its time. Many of her poems, “These Beasts and the Benin Bronze,” “Sadie's Playhouse,” and “Through the Varied Patterned Lace,” are full of vibrant imagery that is inspired by African folklore. Her poems have been published in many journals and anthologies, and readings of her work have been recorded. A booklet of her poems, To Flower: Poems, was published in the Counterpoise Series in 1963. In addition to her writing, Danner has also enjoyed a successful career in academia. In 1960 Danner became the first Poet in Residence at Wayne State (MI) University in Detroit. At that time, she founded Boone House, a poetry and art center for budding African American artists and writers. In 1966 she was part of the First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal.

Gloria Catherine Oden (1923– ), who grew up the daughter of a minister in Yonkers, New York, has been mentioned alongside great women poets of the past century like Marianne Moore, Louise Bogan, and Elizabeth Bishop, as a writer who can combine the literal and the symbolic, the real and the fanciful. Her work is routinely grounded in a sense of loss. However, it appeals primarily to the intellect. There is an ironic detachment in her work that moves readers away from pathos and distinguishes Oden from many of her contemporaries. She was a professor of English at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and has been honored by many organizations, including the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Naomi Long Madgett (1923– ), also the daughter of a minister, was born in Norfolk, Virginia, and educated at Virginia State College and Wayne State (MI) University. She has published three volumes of poetry: Songs of the Phantom Nightingale (1941), One and the Many (1956), and Star by Star (1965). Her poems are largely free-verse and focus on racial identity and injustice and, in poems like “Alabama Centennial,” on the need for change in the American political system. Robert Hayden and other literary critics have written favorably of Madgett's race-related work, but many more critics have been drawn to her lyric poems on the enduring themes of personal experience, love, nature, and death.

Mari Evans (1923– ) has composed songs and studied fashion design in addition to writing poems. Her free-flowing poems, driven by sparse conversational language, are akin to Langston Hughes's jazz poetry—indeed, to jazz itself—in their improvisational, elliptical nature. Many of her poems contain direct and/or indirect mu-sical references. She has been Writer-in-Residence and Assistant Professor in Black Literature at Indiana University and has also taught at Spelman College, the State University of New York at Albany, and Cornell, Northwestern, and Purdue Universities. Her poems have been anthologized in Beyond the Blues (1962), American Negro Poetry (1963), and New Negro Poets: U.S.A.> (1964); her books include Where Is All the Music? (1968) and I Am a Black Woman (1970). In addition, she contributed to and edited Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation (1984).

Dolores Kendrick (1927– ), the poet laureate of Washington, DC, has published three books of poetry: Through the Ceiling (1975), Now Is the Thing to Praise (1984), and The Women of Plums: Poems in the Voices of Slave Women (c. 1989). Her ability to articulate, without sentimentality, the struggles facing nineteenth-century African American women makes her writing especially engaging and valuable. Poems such as “Jenny in Love,” (which reads, in its entirety: “Danced in the evenin'/while/the supper/burn;/ whupped/in the morning:/danced again!”) speak to the perseverance, humor, and deep humanity of Kendrick's subjects; such poems have earned her a position as a matriarchal figure for late-twentieth-century African American women poets. Kendrick has received the Anisfield-Wolf Award, the George Kent Award for Literature, New York Library's Best Book for Teenagers Award for The Women of Plums, a Fulbright Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. Her stage adaptation of The Women of Plums won the New York Playwrights Award in 1997 and was produced at the Kennedy Center in 1997–1998. She is Vira I. Heinz Professor Emerita at Phillips Exeter Academy.

Maya Angelou (1928– ) was born Marguerite Johnson in St. Louis, Missouri. An author, poet, historian, songwriter, dancer, playwright, stage and screen producer, director, performer, singer, and civil rights activist, she grew up in St. Louis, San Francisco, and Stamps, Arkansas. She has written critically and commercially successful books in several genres, including autobiography: All God's Children Need Traveling Shoes (1986), The Heart of a Woman (1981), and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), which was nominated for the National Book Award; and poetry: A Brave and Startling Truth (1995), The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994), Shaker, Why Don't You Sing? (1983), and Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water 'fore I Die (1971), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Angelou's list of accomplishments has an awe-inspiring degree of depth and range. In 1959 Maya Angelou became northern coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference at the request of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. From 1961 to 1962 she was associate editor of The Arab Observer in Cairo, Egypt, the only English-language news weekly in the Middle East, and from 1964 to 1966 she was feature editor of the African Review in Accra, Ghana. After she returned to the U.S. in 1974, Gerald Ford appointed her to the Bicentennial Commission. Later, Jimmy Carter appointed her to the Commission for International Woman of the Year. She accepted a lifetime appointment in 1981 as Reynolds Professor of American Studies at Wake Forest University. In 1993 Angelou wrote and delivered a poem, “On the Pulse of Morning,” at the inauguration of President William Jefferson Clinton at his request.

Angelou was the first black woman director in Hollywood. She has written, produced, and starred in productions for stage, film, and television. In 1971 she wrote the original screenplay and musical score for the film Georgia, Georgia, and was both author and executive producer of a five-part television miniseries Three Way Choice. In addition, she has written and produced several prize-winning documentaries, including “Afro-Americans in the Arts,” a PBS special for which she received the Golden Eagle Award. Maya Angelou was twice nominated for a Tony Award in acting: once for her Broadway debut in Look Away (1973) and again for her portrayal of Nyo Boto in the television adaptation of the best-selling novel Roots (1977). Past her seventy-fifth birthday, Angelou continued to travel extensively, giving readings and speeches, serving as an inspiration to several generations.

Sonia Sanchez (1934– ) described herself in Black Spirits: A Festival of New Black Poets in America (1972) as a “blk/woman/mother/poet/playwright/teacher who tries to teach the truth.” One of the best poets to emerge from the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, she has the rare talent of being able to write effective poems in a variety of tones and about subjects ranging from personal depression to historical events (the 1985 MOVE bombing in Philadelphia, for example). Her poems address the tensions between white and black, old and young, women and men. Many of her poems, such as “right on: white america,” are intended to be controversial, to serve as political rallying cries and wake-up calls. In the words of Michael S. Harper and Anthony Walton, editors of Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep (1994), Sanchez's work “searingly narrates the passions and concerns of an astute and aware black woman in the late twentieth century.”

Audre Lorde (1934–1992) was born in Harlem to Caribbean immigrants. She graduated from Hunter College, received an MLS from Columbia University, and worked as a librarian and schoolteacher before becoming Professor of English at Hunter College in 1981. Her poems address the variety of societally imposed roles—black, wife, teacher—that she encountered over the course of her life. They also offer an emotional map of sorts to her life as a complete person: a poet, feminist, lesbian, and political activist. Perhaps most interesting about Lorde's work is the way it examines how we describe and label the world. Equally important is the way Lorde's sense of self expanded as she developed a deeper understanding of personal and cultural history.

The poems of Lucille Clifton (1936– ), built of sparse, precise language and exact rhythms, may appear, if skimmed, to be slight, even simple. When read carefully, however, especially when read aloud, the clear, profound voice within her poems asserts a depth of emotional and social intelligence that can be found nowhere else in contemporary poetry. Clifton frequently writes about personal and societal tragedy, with a focus on overcoming setbacks and continuing to live a strong, happy, even joyous life. Her books of poetry include Mercy (2004), Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems, 1988-2000 (2000), winner of the National Book Award; The Terrible Stories, nominated for the National Book Award; The Book of Light (1993); Quilting: Poems 1987-1990 (1991); Next: New Poems (1987); Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir 1969–1980 (1987), nominated for the Pulitzer Prize; and Two Headed-Woman (1980), also a Pulitzer Prize nominee and winner of the University of Massachusetts Press's Juniper Prize. In addition, she has written sixteen books for children. Other honors include an Emmy Award, a Lannon Literary Award, and two National Endowment for the Arts poetry fellowships. In 1999 she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She has served as Poet Laureate for the State of Maryland and as of 2005 was distinguished professor of Humanities at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

June Jordan (1936–2002) was born in New York City on 9 July. A political activist and award-winning poet and essayist, Jordan distinguished herself in several genres, including poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and writing for children. She earned praise from critics for addressing the personal struggles and political oppression facing African Americans. Her books of poetry include Who Look at Me (1969), a poem accompanied by paintings that addresses black-white relationships and the nature of racial identity, Some Changes (1971), Things That I Do in the Dark (1977), Passion (1980), Living Room (1985), Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems (1989), Haruko/Love Poems (1994), Kissing God Goodbye: Poems 1991–1997 (1997). She is also the author of children's books, plays, a novel, and Poetry for the People: A Blueprint for the Revolution (1995), a guide to writing, teaching, and publishing poetry. Her prose collections include Affirmative Acts: Political Essays (1998), Technical Difficulties (1994), and Soldier: Poet's Childhood (2000). In addition, she was a frequent contributor to The Progressive. Jordan received a Rockefeller Foundation grant, a National Association of Black Journalists Award, and fellowships from the Massachusetts Council for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She taught African American studies and women's studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she founded Poetry for the People.

Jayne Cortez (c. 1936– ) grew up in Arizona and California, and her roots, as well as her love of jazz and blues, are an important component of her poetry. Her poems examine various aspects of Latin, South American, and aboriginal American culture. They have been praised for their strong narrative voices that weave together in interesting ways, and they have had great impacts on audiences. She has written seven collections of poems and has made five recordings of her poetry. In addition, she has been the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts grants and has been on the Executive Board for the Pen American Center.

Toi Derricotte (1941– ) was born in Detroit and educated at Wayne State University and NYU. Her work is characterized by an understated lyricism that illuminates the tenuous nature of human relationships. Her work celebrates family and romantic love, addresses unflinchingly the world's capacity for beauty as well as horror, and focuses often on her experiences as an African American woman in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. She has taught at George Mason University, NYU, Old Dominion University, and the University of Pittsburgh and has published several volumes of poetry, including Tender (1997) and Captivity (1989). She has also published a well-received work of nonfiction, The Black Notebooks.

Nikki Giovanni (1943– ), also known as the “Princess of Black Poetry,” has enjoyed a remarkably prolific and varied career: in addition to several collections of poetry, she has written an autobiography of her first twenty-five years, edited a volume of poetry, recorded her poetry to musical accompaniment, and held distinguished positions at several universities. In addition, her “raps” with Margaret Walker and James Baldwin have been published as books.

Giovanni's work often addresses opposites: white and black, past and present, love and hate, personal and communal, stasis and change. Her themes of unity, love, respect for community and self, and the importance of one's heritage are at once universal and particular to the African American experience. Her work is clearly pro-black, but just as clearly not anti-white. It seeks relentlessly to recognize beauty in the face of ugliness. For example, much of Giovanni's “protest poetry”—a label usually reserved for bitter, angry rants that respond to specific incidents—contains some of her most lovely images and ideas.

In addition to racial injustice, Giovanni writes powerfully about womanhood, family, sexuality, and nature. She breaks down traditional boundaries between readers and writers by relying heavily on a conversational tone. Rather than rejecting slang, dialect, or musical elements, Giovanni fuses them with traditional English to create a distinctive and clear poetic voice that often ignores the traditional roles of line breaks, form, punctuation, grammar, and even spelling. Her rhythms often rely on jazz and blues riffs, on African drumming rhythms and chants. By capturing patterns of African American music and speech, Giovanni has created an authentic language for her black audience. Her work expresses an appreciation for black speech and respects traditions within African and African American cultures.

Sherley Anne Williams (1944–1999) was born in Bakersfield, California, and raised in Fresno. She earned a BA from the University of California at Fresno and studied at Fisk and Howard Universities before earning an MA from Brown University. For many years, she was a professor of English at the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of two poetry collections, a book of criticism, a play, and two novels, the second of which, Dessa Rose (1986), won wide critical acclaim. Her poetry covers a range of styles, from elegant, precise formalism to modernist works grounded in the blues. Many of her poems are concerned with history, music, and the sisterhood of African American women.

Marilyn Nelson (1946– ) was born in Cleveland. She received her bachelor's degree from the University of California, Davis, her master's from the University of Pennsylvania, and her PhD at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of seven books of poetry, including The Field of Praise (1997) and The Homeplace (1985), a National Book Award nominee. Nelson's poems are probing and sparse, blending a painter's attention to small, telling details with unpretentious diction and resonant themes. She often finds inspiration within her own family, as in poems like “My Grandfather Walks in the Woods” and, based on her father's experiences as a member of the first group of African Americans allowed to fly in the United States, “Tuskegee Airfield.”

Before committing to poetry, Wanda Coleman (1946– ) worked as a medical secretary, editor, journalist, and scriptwriter. Coleman's style is characterized by her lack of capitalization and punctuation. Her poems address the myriad trials facing African American women in inner city Los Angeles at the turn of the twenty-first century. They are driven by precise, direct language that transcends strict narrative and lyric impulses and commands one to read them aloud. Coleman won the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Bathwater Wine (1998). The judge, Marilyn Hacker, wrote in her citation that Coleman's work is “[d]emotic, idiosyncratic, at once celebratory and embittered…Coleman's poems are not always easy or reassuring reading. But the generosity of their larger-than-life extravagance, their careful tempering of self-mockery, their elastic balance of overstatement and control, make them a continual, renewable reward.” Coleman is a prolific poet; she published ten books of poetry in nineteen years. She has received poetry fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her collections include Mercurochrome: New Poems (2001), Native in a Strange Land: Trials & Tremors (1996); Hand Dance (1993); African Sleeping Sickness (1990); A War of Eyes & Other Stories (1988); Heavy Daughter Blues: Poems & Stories 1968–1986 (1988). She has also written Mambo Hips & Make Believe: A Novel (1999).

Cheryl Clarke (1947– ) earned her BA from Howard University and her MA, MSW, and PhD from Rutgers University. She has written four books of poetry: Experimental Love (1993), a 1994 Lambda Literary Award nominee; Humid Pitch (1989); Living as a Lesbian (1986); and Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1983). Clarke's writing focuses on questions of sexual, racial, and political identity. Her work has appeared in numerous feminist, lesbian, gay, “straight,” and African American publications, including The Black Scholar, The Kenyon Review, Belles Lettres, A Journal for Jewish Feminists and Our Friends, The World in Us: An Anthology of Lesbian and Gay Poetry, The Arc of Love: An Anthology of Lesbian Love Poetry, and Persistent Desire: A Femme-Butch Reader (1992). She has served as a member of the board of directors of New York Women Against Rape, was a founding member and fund-raiser for New JerseyWomen and AIDS Network, and has served as co-chairperson of the board of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School. Clarke works at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick campus, as the director of the Office of Diverse Community Affairs and Lesbian-Gay Concerns.

Ntozake Shange (1948– ), a poet, performance artist, playwright, and novelist, was born Paulette Williams on 18 October 1948, in Trenton, New Jersey. She earned a BAfrom Barnard College and an MA from UCLA. She is known for crafting multilayered texts, rich in feminist, racial, and sexual themes, that often abandon conventions such as plot and character development. Her books of poetry include Ridin' the Moon in Texas (1997), From Okra to Greens (1984), A Daughter's Geography (1983), Nappy Edges (1978), Natural Disasters and Other Festive Occasions (1977), and Melissa & Smith (1976). Among her plays are Daddy Says (1989), Spell #7 (1985), From Okra to Greens/A Different Kinda Love Story (1983), and for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf (1977), a group of twenty poems for seven actors that dramatize the power that African American women must summon in order to survive in the face of heartbreak, depression, and pain. for colored girls made Shange famous, earning Tony, Grammy, and Emmy award nominations. Shange is also the author of the prose works: If I Can Cook You Know God Can (1998), See No Evil: Prefaces, Essays, & Accounts 1976-1983 (1984), Sassafass, Cypress & Indigo: A Novel (1982) and The Black Book (1986, with Robert Mapplethorpe). Among her numerous honors are fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Lila Wallace–Reader's Digest Fund, and a Pushcart Prize.

Gayl Jones (1949– ) was born in Lexington, Kentucky. Her early experiences with Southern culture are reflected in her writing, which spans several genres, including poetry, novels, short fiction, drama, and literary criticism. Jones moved from the South to attend Connecticut College, where she received a BA in English in 1971. She then earned an MFA and a PhD in Creative Writing at Brown University, where her first play, Chile Woman, was produced. Jones's writing career began with two published novels, Corregidora (1975) and Eva's Man (1976). After publishing a book of short stories called White Rat (1977), Jones turned to poetry, writing a volume-length poem, Songs for Anninho (1981), which was followed by two other poetry volumes, The Hermit-Woman (1983) and Xarque & Other Poems (1985).

Much of Jones's work focuses on how contradictory emotions can coexist within oppressed people. The complex blend of love–hate, confidence–paranoia, beauty–ugliness makes Jones's work intellectually and emotionally demanding. Another feature of Jones's work is the emphasis she places on storytelling—a key component of the African American tradition and an indispensable source of family history. Jones's other books include two novels, Mosquito (1999) and The Healing (1998), and a book of criticism, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (1991),

Rita Dove (1952– ) has emerged as one of the most influential black poets of the late twentieth century. After graduating summa cum laude from Miami University of Ohio with her BA in 1973, she attended the University of Tubingen, in Germany, on a Fulbright Fellowship and completed her MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Iowa in 1977. She began her academic career in 1981 at Arizona State University, and in 1989 she became Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Dove was named poet laureate of the United States in 1993, the first African American and then the youngest person to hold that title. She was also the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, which she won for Thomas and Beulah (1986). Dove's brush-stroke attention to detail, tight rhythms, and unfailing music reveal the influence of other art forms on her poetry. Equally at ease writing about the hardships of rural Ohio as about the elegance of ballroom dancing, in employing strict villanelles and sonnets as in using sweeping free-verse stanzas, Rita Dove has amassed a truly impressive and resonant body of work.

Like many of her contemporaries, Dove has enjoyed success in multiple genres. In addition to her eight poetry collections, which include American Smooth (2004), Grace Notes (1989), The Museum (1983), and The Yellow House in the Corner (1980), she has published a novel, Through the Iron Gate (1992), a short story collection, Fifth Sunday (1985), and a verse drama, The Darker Face of the Earth (1994).

Thylias Moss (1954– ) is a poet gifted with startling ability to write effectively in a range of voices, from comic to elegiac, and to deal in direct yet novel ways with issues like racial oppression, identity, and sexuality. Her best poems draw comparisons to, as well as inspiration from, the greatest poets of the last two centuries. In “A Reconsideration of the Blackbird,” for example, she invokes not only the imagination of Wallace Stevens, but also the political spirit of Allen Ginsberg and Gwendolyn Brooks: “Let's call him Jim Crow./Let's call him Nigger and see if he rises/faster than when we say abracadabra./Guess who's coming to dinner?/Score ten points if you said blackbird./Score twenty points if you were more specific, as in the first line./…/Problem: No one's in love with the blackbirds./Solution: Paint them white, call them visions, everyone will want one.” Her books of poetry include Last Chance for the Tarzan Holler (1998), Small Congregations: New and Selected Poems (1993), Rainbow Remnants in Rock Bottom Ghetto Sky (1991), Pyramid of Bone (1988), and Hosiery Seams on a Bowlegged Woman (1983).

The Future of African American Women's Poetry

Since the days of Phillis Wheatley, African American women poets have emerged as a cornerstone of American literature. Their struggle from obscurity to prominence reflects the great social and political progress that our country has made since its inception, and their perseverance through racial and gender discrimination reflects great pride and an unbreakable collective will. African American women poets currently enjoy freedoms and honors that their predecessors could only dream of, and many have accepted prestigious academic appointments at colleges and universities across the country. Equally remarkable, African American women poets now have the creative freedom to write about themes beyond race and gender and still have reason to hope that their work might be published. Indeed, many literary journals, writing organizations, and book publishers now actively support poetry by African American women.

Perhaps as a result of greater support, a number of impressive African American female poets have emerged within the past fifteen years. Elizabeth Alexander (1962– ) writes poems that address identity, gender, race, and motherhood. Her poetry collections are Antebellum Dream Book (2001), Body of Life (1996), and The Venus Hottentot (1990). Natasha Trethewey (1966– ) has written beautifully about African American history and culture. Her books are Bellocq's Ophelia (2002) and Domestic Work (2000), selected by Rita Dove as winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet. Allison Joseph (1967– ) has written five collections of poetry, Worldly Pleasures (2004), Imitation of Life (2003), Soul Train (1997), In Every Seam (1997), and What Keeps Us Here (1992). Her poems explore issues of empowerment, race, and motherhood with a clarity and precision akin to Brooks, Clifton, and Dove.

While African American women's poetry currently enjoys its most venerated position to date, its best days lie ahead. The range of subjects, themes, styles, and voices in African American women's poetry will become even more plentiful as social opportunities and critical attention continue to increase. Because their voices were silenced by the white male voice for too long, African American women poets, as well as other marginalized groups such as Asian, Jewish, Latino, and Chicano Americans, need to be highlighted as the United States moves into the twenty-first century. While still far from being free from prejudice, the United States, more mosaic than melting pot, and its literature have never been more receptive to a greater plurality of voices or a wider-ranging polyphony of songs.

See also Autobiography; Fiction; and Playwriting.

processed xml | source xml