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In Approaches to Poetry Writing South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile reveals insight into his development as a poet, various lessons learned from a wide variety of important poets and advice to developing writers.

Tony Medina's latest collection of poetry is satirical and surprising commentary on contemporary issues facing young and old alike. His mastery of language, imagery, conversation, and voice permeates each and every selection within this 100-plus page volume. The Caribbean writer and novelist Jan Carew shares the following: ""The poetry . . . is complex. It strips the street to its simplest common denominator of survival and tears off layer upon layer of stark realism.""

What happens to fraternal love when identical twins stop being identical? To romantic love when indiscretions done in the dark have a secret witness? What happens to a family when the love that binds also strangles? Inspired by Egyptian mythology and young America’s coming-of-age story, AMERICUS follows the lives of rambunctious identical twins Asar and Set Americus. After Set contracts vitiligo (a skin disease that fades body pigmentation in patches), he goes from family favorite to stare-provoking freak at 10-years-old. When Set’s super-capable mother can’t keep her promise to cure him, Set blames her, but not more than she blames herself. “... in an era of white mob violence that crested and broke in the early decades of the twentieth century, Michael Datcher weaves a narrative of three generations of sons trying to cultivate and maintain their manhood against relentless forces. Simultaneously a mythic novel and a historical one, AMERICUS is a story of the monsters that emerge from the monstrosities of American history. With this novel, Datcher joins August Wilson and Toni Morrison as an American storyteller.” --P. Gabrielle Foreman Ned B. Allen Professor of English & Black Studies, The University of Delaware

This book legitimizes the need for African-centered education at an early age in child development.

Dr. Aminifu R. Harvey’s compilation of his selected writings is enormously important for those interested in Afrocentric theory and practice. Dr. Harvey has provided the necessary confluence between Afrocentric theory and practice and how this link can be used to explain and resolve the pressing mental and social problems that have afflicted people of African ancestry. His work is seminal because he is the first trained social worker in the U.S. to incorporate the cultural principles and practices of traditional Africa into the social work/human service profession’s written knowledge base. This is a major accomplishment for at least two reasons. Although social work’s written knowledge base had begun to integrate what was referred to as “the Black Perspective” in the 1970s, this perspective largely focused on African-Americans’ experiences with racial oppression in the U.S. and how they resisted and creatively adapted to that oppression. Little, if any, attention has been given to how the legacy of traditional Africa influenced the lives of Black people. Second, the professional acknowledgement of traditional African cultural principles and practices allowed Dr. Harvey to initiate the critical work of codifying these principles and practices into a coherent model of human service practice and research. Dr. Harvey can and should be viewed as one of the “founders” of what we now commonly refer to as “culturally competent” mental health and human service practice. This book is a must read for those who seek to better understand the evolution of the Afrocentric paradigm as one of the earliest expressions of using an oppressed group’s culture as the foundation for professional practice.” -Jerome H. Schiele, D.S.W., Bowie State University Department of Social Work