In this collection, Regina Jennings' poems passionately reveal the beauty and tragedy of women in the Black Panther Party and beyond. She explores the often haunting reality of growing up Black and female during the spirited, tumultuous 1960s and 1970s. In spare, often brutally honest narrative verse, Jennings spins stories of home, homelessness, and rebuilding home.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Winnie
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A group of poems dedicated to Winnie Mandela, the wife of Nelson Mandela who was the first indigenous leader to hold the office of President of the Republic of South Africa.
Aneb Kgositsile
Shrines
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This collection of poetry explores the intimate beauty of our most sacred places. The landscape of these poems is as far-reaching as the continent of Africa and as close as the next room.
Haki R. Madhubuti
Run Toward Fear
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Run Toward Fear offers readers a mixture of poems that challenge and cause both reflection on and questioning about many headline issues that have launched this century. Madhubuti includes poignant moving tributes to Jacob Carruthers, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka, as well as heartfelt words that provide comfort and guidance to the families of the 21 people who lost their lives in Chicago's E-2 nightclub tragedy. The final section of the book, ""A Poet's Handbook,"" provides personal and sometimes anecdotal insights on the craft of writing poetry.
Patrick T. Reardon
Puddin'
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It is the story of a baby—me—during my first fourteen months, leading up to the birth of David. It’s told from the perspective and in the voice of a baby. Each of this small book’s 101 chapters is imagined. Yet, each is rooted in reality, in facts and feelings.
Sterling Plumpp
Ornate with Smoke
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Poetry that comes out of the jazz music of African American artists.
Keorapetse Kgositsile
To the Bitter End
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South African poet Keorapetse Kgositsile rejuvenates the African spirit and continues the quest for total and uncompromised liberation.
Kelly Norman Ellis
Tougaloo Blues
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This collection of poems explores the author's southern roots through a blues/narrative voice and revisits her Mississippi youth, while revealing the contemporary voice of a Black woman searching for place and community outside of her southern past.
Sterling Plumpp
Velvet Bebop Kente Cloth
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This collection is the third in a trilogy of poetic works created by Sterling Plumpp to allow audiences to explore the language of music articulated through the nuances of jazz, blues, and bebop. The poetry in Velvet Be Bop Kente Cloth utilizes distinct rhythms and a non-conventional use of line and line breaks. It also draws upon the musical innovations established by Charlie Parker, Dizzie Gillispie, and others.
Maulana Karenga
Million Man March/Day of Absence
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A comprehensive treatment of the 1996 Million Man March using essays, photographs, and poetry.
Mzee Lasana Okpara (Fred Lee Hord)
Longer Than Breath
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When I met Toussaint, I was struck instantly by both his name and demeanor. Over the years, it became clear my son-in-law was a new Toussaint, principled warrior, and community leader. This book of poems is an extended conversation between me and his widowed wife, my daughter. So how many Black women have lost life partners, this, however, was not the result of external violence, just the wearing away of his body. Their love remains intact.
Wade Hudson
Journey
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Keith Gilyard
Impressions
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The heart of this ambitious and energetic collection is the conscientious and trusted mind of a giving and loving Black artist who in his own way understands history, psychology, economics, politics, and, most of all, the unique power of language in his application of “chord inversions” in the use of serving the urgent needs of Black lives. As a poet and empirical scientist who dances with words, ideas, real life, practical clarifications, and humor, Gilyard challenges his readers to act.
Gwendolyn A. Mitchell
House of Women
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Creating a storyteller's circle where women share their joy, pain, and experience, the poems in this collection are lyrical vignettes, in which women sing familiar songs of love, solidarity, and sisterhood.
Randall Horton
Fingernails Across the Chalkboard
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Featuring a wide assortment of poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction, this powerful volume confronts the existence of the HIV/AIDS epidemic within the Black Diaspora. Defining a cultural dialogue that will be prevalent well into the 21st century, these writings celebrate life and the living by humanizing the effects of HIV and giving powerful voices to the affected and afflicted. The writings, presented in four major sections, speak out about the hard-hitting truths that surround HIV; the forms of abuse, such as incest and rape, which cast HIV into the lives of girls and women; the issues of grief and loss; and the range of reactions, from acceptance to denial, activism, and the search for justice. The writers featured include Dennis Brutus, Tony Medina, Randi Triant, Truth Thomas, Duriel Harris, Frank X. Walker, Arisa White, Tara Betts, and Lamont B. Steptoe.
Gwendolyn Brooks
Family Pictures
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Family Pictures is a collection of poems dedicated to her friends and fighting against global anti=blackness
Eugene B. Redmond
Arkansippi Memwars
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Celebrating a career that spans four decades, Eugene B. Redmond’s collected work—Arkansippi Memwars—triumphs. An award-winning poet, playwright and educator, Redmond represents through his body of work the veracity and audacity of the Black Arts Movement, the traditions of the Yoruba, and the complex history of the Black American. The poetry of Redmond moves to the cadence of drums stripped from his ancestors and reclaimed by the burgeoning Hip-Hop movement of the 1970s. Fearless, sharp, and satirically masterful are but a few words to describe the excellence of Eugene Redmond and his poetry.
Kelly Norman Ellis
The Spaces Between Us: Poetry, Prose and Art on HIV/AIDS
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As HIV continues to change life on this planet, encouraging tough conversations about sex, sexual orientation, healthy relationships and trust, it invigorates those young and old to challenge the status quo of silence. Editors Kelly Norman Ellis and M.L. Hunter have assembled established and emerging writers and artists from around the globe, such as American Book Award and Pew Fellowship winner Lamont B. Steptoe; renown poet and educator Tony Medina; and Emmy award-winner Kwame Dawes, for this haunting and inspiring collection of poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction that paints living portraits of HIV/AIDS.
Quraysh Ali Lansana
They Shall Run
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These poems trace the journeys of the great Black historical figure Harriet Tubman and her fugitives through the backwoods of America.
Kahil El' Zabar
Mis Taken Brilliance
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Mis Taken Brilliance is percussionist extraordinaire Kahil El'Zabar's debut poetry collection. El'Zabar's many moods are expressed in an ecology of rhythm and rifts, harmony and phraseology. El'Zabar is the talking drummer who revels in the textures, the tonality, and beat of life.
Useni Eugene Perkins
Memories & Images
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Perkins reveals his personal development into his present philosophy as he recounts his childhood, extols his heroes, and sings about the jazz greats.
Mzee Lasana Okpara (Fred Lee Hord)
Life Sentences
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Life Sentences: Freeing Black Relationships is a Black man's response to the devastating effect of the Euro-Western concept of love on Black relationships. Author Mzee Lasana Okpara (formerly Fred Hord) demonstrates keen insight and confronts complex contemporary and historical issues which thwart efforts towards genuine bonding between the Black man and woman. Okpara's voice is intimate, challenging, and resolute.
Cranston Knight
La Brigada
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The poems in ""La are"" are about the impact of Spain on La Brigada, the American unit that fought in the Spanish Civil War. As Cranston Knight states, the poems are about ""those who struggled in a time vortex to save millions in a forgotten war, a forgotten country."" To bridge the cultural and language gap in the telling of these stories, Knight includes a selection of the book's poems in both English and Spanish.
Haki R. Madhubuti
Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors
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Written in the tradition and style of the Black Arts Movement, this collection contains lyrical poems, laced with satirical allusions and political exhortations to Black readers.
Estella Conwill Majozo
Jiva Telling Rites
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This is a collection of poems in verse and short prose that tells the story of a woman's anguish and growth in a hostile environment. The poems move into praise songs for people deemed worthy of recognition.
Mzee Lasana Okpara (Fred Lee Hord)
Into Africa, Being Black
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This precious volume of new and selected poems justly widens Dr. Hord's space among the poets of the Black Arts Movement. He remains, as John O. Killers would state, one of the long distance runners. He is in a league with Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Askia Toure, Jayne Cortez, Eugene Redmond, Lucille Clifton, Kalamu ya Salaam, and others who created a movement that helped to change America and the world for the literate and liberated majority.