#ReadInColor: Black Poets

On January 20, 2021, Amanda Gorman became the sixth and youngest poet to deliver a poetry reading at a presidential inauguration. Taking the stage after the 46th president of the United States, Joe Biden, Gorman captivated the nation and brought hope to viewers around the globe. Including an enduring foreword by Oprah Winfrey, this keepsake celebrates the promise of America?and affirms the power of poetry.

"Rita Dove's Collected Poems: 1974-2004 showcases the wide-ranging diversity that earned her a Pulitzer Prize, the position of US poet laureate, a National Humanities Medal and a National Medal of Art. Gathering thirty years and seven books, this volume compiles Dove's reflections on adolescence in The Yellow House on the Corner and her irreverent musings in Museum. She sets the moving love story of Thomas and Beulah against the backdrop of war, industrialisation...

Now in paperback, Directed by Desire is the definitive overview of June Jordan's -poetry. Collecting the finest work from Jordan's ten volumes, as well as dozens of "last poems" that were never published in Jordan's lifetime, these more than six hundred pages overflow with intimate lyricism, elegance, fury, meditative solos, and dazzling vernacular riffs. As Adrienne Rich writes in her introduction, June Jordan "wanted her readers, listeners, students,...

Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV-everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to...

"Alice Walker, author of the National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning The Color Purple--"an American novel of permanent importance" (San Francisco Chronicle)--crafts a bilingual collection that is both playfully imaginative and intensely moving. Presented in both English and Spanish, Alice Walker shares a timely collection of nearly seventy works of passionate and powerful poetry that bears witness to our troubled times, while also chronicling...

This work uses a complement of female narrators to examine what it is like to be of color and female in America. It includes stage directions and pictures from the poem/play's various productions and a Reading group guide.

HOW DO WE RECKON OUR PAST WITHOUT BEING RAVAGED BY IT? HOW DO WE USE PEOPLE, AND THEIR BODIES, TO EXPRESS OURSELVES? Saeed Jones’s debut poetry collection Prelude to Bruise was the winner of the 2015 Stonewall Book Award/Barbara Gittings Literature Award and a finalist for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award.

A voice for justice, anti-racism, and equality, here is the greatest and most powerful work of the people's poet, Wanda Coleman. One of the most talked about literary collections of the year is this collection by a beat-up, broke, and Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and clarity about her life on the margins. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems is a selection of 130 of Coleman's poems spanning four decades, edited and introduced by Terrance...