36 Books Published by Northwestern University Press on AALBC — Book Cover Collage

Click for more detail about Unshuttered: Poems by Patricia Smith Unshuttered: Poems

by Patricia Smith
TriQuarterly Books (Feb 15, 2023)
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Unshuttered by Patricia Smith

Award-winning poet Patricia Smith presents Unshuttered, a vivid portrayal of Black America in the nineteenth century, framed through a unique collection of rare photographs. Over two decades, Smith has gathered these historical images of Black individuals and families, whose gazes reach us across time.

Unshuttered serves as a conduit for the voices of this pivotal era. Smith’s powerful verses and insightful language breathe life into the photo subjects, infusing them with renewed urgency and vitality. She explores the connection between her own life’s triumphs and losses and the lived experiences of these figures from the past:

We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’ hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us.

Smith’s mastery of dramatic monologue and poetic form resurrects the emotions and narratives embedded in these historic images. Unshuttered is a testament to her skill in weaving history into fierce and formidable lyricism, marking her as one of American literature’s most adept wordsmiths.


Click for more detail about Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History by Leslie M. Alexander Ideas in Unexpected Places: Reimagining Black Intellectual History

by Leslie M. Alexander
Northwestern University Press (Apr 15, 2022)
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This transformative collection advances new approaches to Black intellectual history by foregrounding the experiences and ideas of people who lacked access to more privileged mechanisms of public discourse and power. While the anthology highlights renowned intellectuals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, it also spotlights thinkers such as enslaved people in the antebellum United States, US Black expatriates in Guyana, and Black internationals in Liberia. The knowledge production of these men, women, and children has typically been situated outside the disciplinary and conceptual boundaries of intellectual history.

The volume centers on the themes of slavery and sexuality; abolitionism; Black internationalism; Black protest, politics, and power; and the intersections of the digital humanities and Black intellectual history. The essays draw from diverse methodologies and fields to examine the ideas and actions of Black thinkers from the eighteenth century to the present, offering fresh insights while creating space for even more creative approaches within the field.

Timely and incisive, Ideas in Unexpected Places encourages scholars to ask new questions through innovative interpretive lenses—and invites students, scholars, and other practitioners to push the boundaries of Black intellectual history even further.


Click for more detail about We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor We Are Not Wearing Helmets: Poems

by Cheryl Boyce-Taylor
TriQuarterly Books (Feb 15, 2022)
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We Are Not Wearing Helmets is a collection of political love poems rendered through the eyes of Cheryl Boyce‑Taylor, an immigrant living in New York City. For many women of color, aging in America means experiencing a lack of proper medical treatment, inhumane living conditions, poor nutrition, and often isolation. Many seniors feel thrown away, useless, and vulnerable. These poems challenge the injustices of ageism, racism, and oppression with rage, forgiveness, honor, and endurance. During these rough political times, they are salve and balm.

Born in Trinidad and having grown up in Queens, Boyce‑Taylor creates a framework for her own experience out of the life experiences and work of beloved Black women in history. She salutes the women who have lifted her, including Audre Lorde, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ntozake Shange, and Winnie Mandela, as well as her mother, Eugenia Boyce, and her beloved daughter‑in‑law, Deisha Head Taylor.

The poems in this collection are unapologetic, fierce, and confrontational while remaining caring and intimate. They stand strong in the face of adversity and boldly demand what is owed while still honoring and cherishing what is loved.


Click for more detail about More Than Meat and Raiment: Poems by Angela Jackson More Than Meat and Raiment: Poems

by Angela Jackson
TriQuarterly Books (Jan 15, 2022)
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Angela Jackson returns with a poetic collage that draws on imagery from the African American South and the South Side of Chicago, storytelling, the Black Arts Movement, and Hausa folklore. Deftly intertwining narrative and free verse, she expresses the complexities, beauty, and haunts of the multilayered Black voice. Jackson offers a stirring mixture of the music, food, and soul that have come to characterize her lyrical work.

The speakers of these poems reflect on memory and saga, history and legend. Voices recall evenings spent catching fireflies with a younger sister, the aroma of homemade rolls, the father who squeezes papers into his wallet alongside bills in order to appear wealthy (“a flock of green birds rustling inside / to get out for some extravagance”). A Black girl watches TV and dreams of the perfect partner. A citizen contends with the unrelenting devastation of police violence in a work reminiscent of Gwendolyn Brooks’s “verse journalism.” A mother loses her daughter only to witness her rebirth: “Praise be / the human being / that is being.”

In “For Our People,” an homage to Margaret Walker, Jackson summons the resilience and imagination of African Americans, celebrating “each of us injured or exalted, betrayer or betrayed, muted / and declamatory, all one, each of us all of us, each a private star beloved in the universe.” Lauded as one of American poetry’s most vivid voices, Jackson continues her reign among the country’s foremost wordsmiths. This sublime collection delves deep into the porch stories and folktales that have carried the Black voice through all its histories.


Click for more detail about Thunderclouds in the Forecast by Clarence Major Thunderclouds in the Forecast

by Clarence Major
TriQuarterly Books (Oct 15, 2021)
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Thunderclouds in the Forecast traverses the linked histories of two friends—one Black, the other white—who grew up wards of the state in New York. It’s April 1976 and Ray is taking Amtrak to San Francisco to reconnect with Scotty, his oldest friend, whom he met in a shelter for abandoned children. While Ray has embraced the stable tedium of steady employment, Scotty’s life has been erratic, a trail of short-lived affairs and dead-end jobs. Maybe Ray, who’s just won the lottery, is finally in a position to help him.

When Ray’s train is delayed in Lorena, a Gold Rush outpost turned college town, he meets Alice. Together they embark on a romance that tempts him to stay. By the time Ray arrives in San Francisco, Scotty has abandoned his bartending job, his rented room, and his scant belongings and skipped town with a married woman from Lorena. Now Ray has more than one reason to return.

A preeminent American writer who thrives on reinvention, Major returns with an unforgettable exploration of life on the brink of sweeping change. With spare prose and subtle poignancy, Thunderclouds in the Forecast probes love, loyalty, and belonging. As Toni Morrison wrote, “Clarence Major has a remarkable mind and the talent to match.”


Click for more detail about Gone Missing in Harlem by Karla FC Holloway Gone Missing in Harlem

by Karla FC Holloway
TriQuarterly Books (Apr 15, 2021)
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“With an evocative mix of questions and revelations, Gone Missing in Harlem shows a vivid sense of the lost and found. Karla FC Holloway again gives us the rich layers of Weldon Thomas’s detective work. Migration, abduction, and striving create the sense of wonder that fuels this resonant novel.” —Ravi Howard, author of Driving the King: A Novel

In her anticipated second novel, Karla Holloway evokes the resilience of a family whose journey traces the river of America’s early twentieth century. The Mosby family, like other thousands, migrate from the loblolly-scented Carolinas north to the Harlem of their aspirations—with its promise of freedom and opportunities, sunlit boulevards, and elegant societies.

The family arrives as Harlem staggers under the flu pandemic that follows the First World War. DeLilah Mosby and her daughter, Selma, meet difficulties with backbone and resolve to make a home for themselves in the city, and Selma has a baby, Chloe. As the Great Depression creeps across the world at the close of the twenties, however, the farsighted see hard times coming.

The panic of the early thirties is embodied in the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of the nation’s dashing young aviator, Charles Lindbergh. A transfixed public follows the manhunt in the press and on the radio. Then Chloe goes missing—but her disappearance does not draw the same attention. Wry and perceptive Weldon Haynie Thomas, the city’s first “colored” policeman, takes the case.

The urgent investigation tests Thomas’s abilities to draw out the secrets Harlem harbors, untangling the color-coded connections and relationships that keep company with greed, ghosts, and grief. With nuanced characters, lush historical detail, and a lyrical voice, Gone Missing in Harlem affirms the restoring powers of home and family.


Click for more detail about Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts by Nikky Finney Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems & Artifacts

by Nikky Finney
TriQuarterly Books (Apr 15, 2020)
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Finalist, Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry

Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a twenty-first-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life. National Book Award winner Nikky Finney’s fifth collection contains lighthouse poems, narrative hotbeds, and treasured artifacts—copper coins struck from a new matrix for poetry, one that testifies from the witness stand and punctuates the occasional lyric within a new language of “docu-poetry.”

The ancestors arise and fly, and the black female body is the “insurgent sensualist,” hunted but fighting to live and love in the ways it wants and knows best: “I loved being / a black girl but had not yet learned / to play dead…”

The tenderness of a father’s handwritten notes shadows the collection like a ghost, while the treasured, not-for-sale interiority of a black girl’s fountainhead takes over every page. “One yellaw gal with an all-black tongue has gone missing.” Finney has composed a new black spiritual, and one of the great voices of our time again stamps her singular sound into the new day.


Click for more detail about Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry

by Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne
TriQuarterly Books (Jan 17, 2020)
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Furious Flower: Seeding the Future of African American Poetry is an anthology of poems by more than one hundred award-winning poets, including Jericho Brown, Justin Philip Reed, and Tracy K. Smith, with themed essays on poetics from celebrated scholars such as Kwame Dawes, Meta DuEwa Jones, and Evie Shockley.

The Furious Flower Poetry Center is the nation’s first academic center for Black poetry. In this eponymous collection, editors Joanne V. Gabbin and Lauren K. Alleyne bring together many of the paramount voices in Black poetry and poetics active today, composing an electrifying mosaic of voices, generations, and aesthetics that reveals the Black narrative in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers. Intellectually enlightening and powerfully enlivening, Furious Flower explores and celebrates the idea of the Black poetic voice by posing the question, What’s next for Black poetic expression?

Read about The Furious Flower Conference of 1994

Poets Featured:

  1. John Bracey (Foreword)
  2. Iain Haley Pollock
  3. Gregory Pardlo
  4. A. Van Jordan
  5. Glenis Redmond
  6. Fred Joiner
  7. Frank X. Walker
  8. F. Douglas Brown
  9. E. Ethelbert Miller
  10. Erica Hunt
  11. Duriel E. Harris
  12. Douglas Manuel
  13. Douglas Kearney
  14. Dante Micheaux
  15. Jericho Brown
  16. Jacqueline Jones LaMon
  17. Janice N. Harrington
  18. Hayes Davis
  19. Clemonce Heard
  20. DaMaris B. Hill
  21. Cynthia Manick
  22. Curtis L. Crisler
  23. Cortney Lamar Charleston
  24. Cornelius Eady
  25. CM Burroughs
  26. John Murillo
  27. Tara Betts
  28. t’ai freedom ford
  29. Shayla Lawson
  30. Sherese Francis
  31. Shauna M. Morgan
  32. Samantha Thornhill
  33. Safiya Sinclair
  34. Safia Elhillo
  35. Remica Bingham-Risher
  36. Randall Horton
  37. Raina J. León
  38. Phillip B. Williams
  39. Donika Kelly
  40. Dominique Christina
  41. Dexter L. Booth
  42. Destiny O. Birdsong
  43. Derrick Weston Brown
  44. DéLana R. A. Dameron
  45. David Mills
  46. darlene anita scott
  47. Metta Sáma
  48. Sharan Strange
  49. Candice Wiley
  50. Bianca Lynne Spriggs
  51. Ana-Maurine Lara
  52. Amber Flora Thomas
  53. Amaud Jamaul Johnson
  54. Amanda Johnston
  55. Ama Codjoe
  56. Alan W. King
  57. Abdul Ali
  58. Kwame Dawes
  59. Yalie Kamara
  60. Xandria Phillips
  61. Tyehimba Jess
  62. Tracy K. Smith
  63. Tony Medina
  64. Toi Derricotte
  65. Tiana Clark
  66. Thylias Moss
  67. Teri Ellen Cross Davis
  68. Taylor Johnson
  69. Cedric Tillman
  70. Camille T. Dungy
  71. Bettina Judd
  72. avery r. young
  73. Chanda Feldman
  74. Joshua B. Bennett
  75. JP Howard
  76. Julian Randall
  77. Justin Phillip Reed
  78. Kamilah Aisha Moon
  79. Keith S. Wilson
  80. Kevin Simmonds
  81. Khadijah Queen
  82. Korey Williams
  83. Krista Franklin
  84. L. Lamar Wilson
  85. Lauren Russell
  86. Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
  87. Lynne Procope
  88. Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon
  89. Major Jackson
  90. Marcus Jackson
  91. Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie
  92. Matthew Shenoda
  93. Mahtem Shiferraw
  94. Mendi Lewis Obadike
  95. Meta DuEwa Jones
  96. Michael Collins
  97. Nabila Lovelace
  98. Nandi Comer
  99. Natasha Marin
  100. Natasha Oladokun
  101. Nate Marshall
  102. Nagueyalti Warren
  103. Nicole Sealey
  104. Nkosi Nkululeko
  105. Opal Moore
  106. Evie Shockley
  107. Ladan Osman
  108. Rickey Laurentiis
  109. Jasmine Richards
  110. Terrance Hayes
  111. francine j. harris
  112. Patricia Spears Jones
  113. Patricia Smith
  114. Ruth Ellen Kocher
  115. Ross Gay
  116. Arisa White
  117. Saretta Morgan
  118. Indigo Moor
  119. Marcus Wicker
  120. Danez Smith
  121. Aricka Foreman
  122. Mary Alice Daniel
  123. Clint Smith
  124. Darrel Alejandro Holnes
  125. Reginald Dwayne Dwayne Betts
  126. Mitchel L.H. Douglas
  127. Charif Shanahan
  128. Anastacia Renée
  129. Alexis Pauline Gumbs
  130. Valencia Robin


Click for more detail about A Death in Harlem: A Novel by Karla FC Holloway A Death in Harlem: A Novel

by Karla FC Holloway
TriQuarterly Books (Sep 15, 2019)
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”Holloway’s debut novel will take you on a journey that reveals a fresh, richly layered, and rarely seen — or imagined — view of early twentieth-century black life and society. Fascinating characters, rich period detail, secrets, scandals, power, privilege, poverty, and plenty of plot twists make for an unforgettable and unflinching glimpse into a world that many will find surprising, mysterious, and possibly even mythical. Others of us know how real this world was, is. Nella [Larsen] would be pleased.” —Virginia DeBerry, coauthor of Better Than I Know Myself

Holloway, the James B. Duke Professor Emerita of English and Law at Duke University, weaves a page-turning mystery in the bon vivant world of the Harlem Renaissance. Taking as her point of departure the tantalizingly ambiguous “death by misadventure” at the climax of Nella Larsen’s 1929 best-selling novel Passing, Holloway takes readers back to the sunlit boulevards and shaded sidestreets of Jazz Age New York. A murder there will test the mettle, resourcefulness, and intuition of Harlem’s first “colored” policeman, Weldon Haynie Thomas.

Clear glass towers rising in Manhattan belie a city where people are often not what they seem. For some here, identity is a performance of passing — passing for another race, for another class, for someone safe to trust. Thomas’s investigation illuminates the societies and secret societies, the intricate code of manners, the world of letters, and the broad social currents of 1920s Harlem.

A Death in Harlem is an exquisitely crafted, briskly paced, and impeccably stylish journey back to a time still remembered as a peak of American glamour. It introduces Holloway as a fresh voice in storytelling, and Weldon Haynie Thomas as an endearing and unforgettable detective.

Holloway’s novel is one of those rare literary jewels from an African American author that will be a proud and prized addition to bookshelves everywhere for years to come.


Click for more detail about Ghost Voices: A Poem in Prayer by Quincy Troupe Ghost Voices: A Poem in Prayer

by Quincy Troupe
TriQuarterly Books (Dec 15, 2018)
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If we were all brave enough to resurrect the voices lost from our humanity, what would they say? Award-winning poet Quincy Troupe, spokesman for the humanizing forces of poetry, music, and art, parts the Atlantic and rattles the ground built on slavery with Ghost Voices: A Poem in Prayer.

we are crossing, / we are / crossing, / we are crossing in big salt water, // we are crossing, // crossing under a sky of no guilt / we have left home // though we know we will go back / someday, / see our people / as we knew them …

Troupe re-creates the history of lost voices between the waters of Africa, Cuba, and the United States. His daring poetics drenched in new forms-notably the seven-elevens-clench transformative narratives spurred on by a relentless, rhythmic language that mimics the foaming waves of the Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. His personae speak quantum litanies within one epic, sermonic-gospel to articulate our most ancient ways of storytelling and survival.


Click for more detail about Seduction: New Poems, 2013-2018 by Quincy Troupe Seduction: New Poems, 2013-2018

by Quincy Troupe
TriQuarterly Books (Dec 15, 2018)
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The world is made of seductions. In Quincy Troupe’s Seduction, the "I" becomes the "Eye," serving as metaphor and witness in a narrative compilation from a master of poetic music. Elegies and dramatic odes look at the seduction of all things loved or hated, especially the man made of color. How did the killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Trayvon Martin seduce the public’s eye and catch the fire of racism? How did Aretha Franklin seduce us with voice and twang? How does the art of Romare Bearden or Jack Whitten still tell our truths, fantasies, and oppressions?

time is a bald eagle, a killer soaring high in the blue, / music to men
dodging bullets in speeding cars, / knew death, hoped it’d never come …

In this collection we are seduced by Troupe’s opus. This is the poet’s art laid bare. He is our "Eye." Visions of the transatlantic slave trade, portraits of American violence, pop culture, and historical voices are the lyrical relics in Troupe’s masterful verse. One of American literature’s most important rhythmical artists, Troupe has created a chronicle reaching through history for the collective "I/Eye" that is all of us.


Click for more detail about New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition by Keisha N. Blain New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition

by Keisha N. Blain
Northwestern University Press (Nov 15, 2018)
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"This volume brings together exciting, cutting edge essays that showcase key intellectual trends and directions in African American history. These historians push beyond the boundaries of knowledge in dynamic and challenging ways." —Martha Biondi, author of The Black Revolution on Campus

"… New Perspectives makes an important contribution to the field of intellectual history. Adding African Americans into the larger narrative, using non-traditional sources, and expanding focus beyond well-known black men pushes readers to expand their ideas about the definition of intellectual history and the place of the black intellectual tradition within it … It could be used in either upper-level undergraduate or graduate classes about African American history or intellectual history." —Michael Blum, The Journal of African American History


Click for more detail about Pardon My Heart: Poems by Marcus Jackson Pardon My Heart: Poems

by Marcus Jackson
TriQuarterly Books (Apr 15, 2018)
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Pardon My Heart is an exploration of love in the contemporary African American ethos. In this lyrically complex collection, the speakers and subjects—the adult descendants of the Great Migration—reckon with past experiences and revelatory, hard-earned ideas about race and class.

With a compelling blend of narrative, musicality, and imagery, Jackson’s poems span a multitude of scenes, landscapes, and sensations. Pardon My Heart examines intimacy, memory, grief, and festivity while seeking out new, reflective sectors within emotion and culture. By means of concise portraiture and sonic vibrancy, Jackson’s poems ultimately express the urgency and pliability of the human soul.


Click for more detail about Miss Muriel And Other Stories by Ann Petry Miss Muriel And Other Stories

by Ann Petry
Northwestern University Press (Jul 15, 2017)
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From the author of the best-selling novel The Street comes a stunning collection of stories that captures a remarkably diverse panorama of African-American experience in the 1950s and 1960s—stories of “a small town pharmacist’s family, a New York nightclub drummer, a high school English teacher, a factory worker, a junk dealer, [and] a charmingly perceptive 12-year-old” (Christian Science Monitor). Set mainly along the East Coast, these realistic tales are, as one reviewer said, “a rare pleasure” (Belles Lettres) to read, as powerful today as they were when they were first published in 1971.

A young black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than seventy years ago, yet in them contemporary readers recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again: the reluctance of African Americans to seek help from the police, the rage that erupts in a black man worn down by brutality, the tyranny that the young can visit on their elders regardless of race. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories capture the essence of African American experience since the 1940s.


Click for more detail about Roads, Where There Are No Roads: A Novel by Angela Jackson Roads, Where There Are No Roads: A Novel

by Angela Jackson
TriQuarterly Books (Apr 15, 2017)
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In this highly anticipated sequel to her acclaimed first novel, Where I Must Go, Angela Jackson continues the remarkable story of Magdalena Grace. As a black student at the predominantly white Eden University, Maggie found herself deeply involved in conflict. Now, out in the wider world, she and her beloved Treemont Stone evolve into agents of change as they become immersed in the historical events unfolding around them—the movements advocating for civil rights, black consciousness, black feminism, the rights of the poor, and an end to the war in Vietnam. Rendered in prose so lyrical and luminous as to suggest a dream, Roads, Where There Are No Roads is a love story in the greatest sense, celebrating love between a man and a woman, between family members, and among the members of a community whose pride pushes them to rise up and resist. This gorgeously written novel will resonate with readers today as incredibly relevant, uplifting hearts and causing eyes to water with sorrow and delight.


Click for more detail about Incendiary Art: Poems by Patricia Smith Incendiary Art: Poems

by Patricia Smith
TriQuarterly Books (Feb 15, 2017)
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One of the most magnetic and esteemed poets in today s literary landscape, Patricia Smith fearlessly confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of mothers in her compelling new collection, "Incendiary Art." She writes an exhaustive lament for mothers of the "dark magicians," and revisits the devastating murder of Emmett Till. These dynamic sequences serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. Smith embraces elaborate and eloquent language ""her gorgeous fallen son a horrid hidden / rot. Her tiny hand starts crushing roses one by one / by one she wrecks the casket s spray. It s how she / mourns a mother, still, despite the roar of thorns"" as she sharpens her unerring focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning. Smith envisions, reenvisions, and ultimately reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. With poems impossible to turn away from, one of America s most electrifying writers reveals what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history. "


Click for more detail about City of Bones: A Testament by Kwame Dawes City of Bones: A Testament

by Kwame Dawes
TriQuarterly Books (Jan 15, 2017)
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As if convinced that all divination of the future is somehow a re-visioning of the past, Kwame Dawes reminds us of the clairvoyance of haunting. The lyric poems in City of Bones: A Testament constitute a restless jeremiad for our times, and Dawes’s inimitable voice peoples this collection with multitudes of souls urgently and forcefully singing, shouting, groaning, and dreaming about the African diasporic present and future.As the twentieth collection in the poet’s hallmarked career, City of Bones reaches a pinnacle, adding another chapter to the grand narrative of invention and discovery cradled in the art of empathy that has defined his prodigious body of work. Dawes’s formal mastery is matched only by the precision of his insights into what is at stake in our lives today. These poems are shot through with music from the drum to reggae to the blues to jazz to gospel, proving that Dawes is the ambassador of words and worlds.


Click for more detail about The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named: Poems by Nicole Sealey The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named: Poems

by Nicole Sealey
Northwestern University Press (Apr 15, 2016)
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The Poetry and Poetics Colloquium, in conjunction with Northwestern University Press, is delighted to announce that Nicole Sealey is the winner of the fourth annual Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named will be published by Northwestern University Press with a planned launch party at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago in January 2016.At turns humorous and heartbreaking, The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named explores in both formal and free verse what it means to die, which is to say, also, what it means to live. In this collection, Sealey displays an exquisite sense of the lyric, as well as an acute political awareness. Never heavy-handed or dogmatic, the poems included in this slim volume excavate the shadows of both personal and collective memory and are, at all points, relentless. To quote the poet herself, here is a debut as luminous and unforgiving "as the unsparing light at tunnel’s end."


Click for more detail about Forest Primeval: Poems by Vievee Francis Forest Primeval: Poems

by Vievee Francis
TriQuarterly Books (Nov 30, 2015)
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"Another Anti-Pastoral," the opening poem of Forest Primeval, confesses that sometimes "words fail." With a "bleat in [her] throat," the poet identifies with the voiceless and wild things in the composed, imposed peace of the Romantic poets with whom she is in dialogue. Vievee Francis’s poems engage many of the same concerns as her poetic predecessors—faith in a secular age, the city and nature, aging, and beauty. Words certainly do not fail as Francis sets off into the wild world promised in the title. The wild here is not chaotic but rather free and finely attuned to its surroundings. The reader who joins her will emerge sensitized and changed by the enduring power of her work.


Click for more detail about The Tragedy of King Christophe by Aimé Césaire The Tragedy of King Christophe

by Aimé Césaire
Northwestern University Press (Feb 28, 2015)
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The Tragedy of King Christophe (1963, revised 1970) is recognized as the Martiniquan writer and activist Aime Cesaire’s greatest play. Set in the period of upheaval in Haiti after the assassination of Jean-Jacques Dessalines in 1806, it follows the historical figure of Henri Christophe, a slave who rose to become a general in Toussaint Louverture’s army. Christophe declared himself king in 1811 and ruled the northern part of Haiti until 1820. Cesaire employs Shakespearean plotting and revels in the inexhaustible possibilities of language to convey the tragedy of Christophe’s transformation from a charismatic leader sensitive to the oppression of his people to an oppressor himself. Paul Breslin and Rachel Ney’s nimble, accurate translation includes an introduction and explanatory notes to guide students, scholars, and general readers alike.


Click for more detail about It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems by Angela Jackson It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time: Poems

by Angela Jackson
TriQuarterly Books (Feb 15, 2015)
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Angela Jackson’s latest collection of poetry borrows its title from a lyric in Barbara Lewis’s 1963 hit single “Hello Stranger,” recorded at Chess Records in Chicago. Like the song, Jackson’s poems are a melodic ode to the African American experience, informed by both individual lives and community history, from the arrival of the first African slave in Virginia in 1619 to post-Obama America.It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time reflects the maturity of Jackson’s poetic vision. The Great Migration, the American South, and Chicago all serve as signposts, but it is the complexity of individual lives—both her own and those who have gone before, walk beside, and come after—that invigorate this collection. Upon surveying so vast a landscape, Jackson finds that sorrow meets delight, and joy lifts up anger and despair. And for all this time, love is the agent, the wise and just rule and guide.


Click for more detail about Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems (Agm Collection) by Aimé Césaire Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Other Poems (Agm Collection)

by Aimé Césaire
Northwestern University Press (May 31, 2013)
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Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas’s new translations of Aimé Césaire’s Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) expose to a new audience a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of a po­et’s course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire’s entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. 

This volume’s inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire’s legacy and remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between “black conscious­ness” and “social consciousness.”


Click for more detail about Autogeography: Poems by Reginald Harris Autogeography: Poems

by Reginald Harris
Northwestern University Press (Apr 30, 2013)
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Winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize
In his second collection of poetry, Reginald Harris traverses real and imagined landscapes, searching for answers to the question “What are you?” From Baltimore to Havana, Atlantic City to Alabama—and from the broad memories of childhood to the very specific moment of Marvin Gaye singing at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game shortly before his death—this is a travel diary of internal and external jour­neys exploring issues of race and sexuality. The poet trav­eler falls into and out of love and lust, sometimes coupled, sometimes alone. Autogeography tracks how who you are changes depending on where you are; how where you are and where you’ve been determine who you are and where you might be headed.


Click for more detail about Pitch Dark Anarchy by Randall Horton Pitch Dark Anarchy

by Randall Horton
TriQuarterly Books (Feb 28, 2013)
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Pitch Dark Anarchy investigates the danger of one single narrative with multilayered poems that challenge concepts of beauty and image, race and identity, as well as the construction of skin color.

Through African American memory and moments in literature, the poems seek to disrupt and dismantle foundations that create erasures and echoes of the unremembered. Pitch Dark Anarchy uses the slave revolt of the Amistad as a starting point, a metaphor for "opposition" and “against.” These themes run through the very core for the book while drawing on inventive and playful language. The poems bring to life human experiences and conditions created by an “elite” society.

In these poems, locations and landscapes are always shifting, proving that our shared experiences can be interchangeable. At the very core of Pitch Dark Anarchy is a seven-part poem based on the artist Margret Bowland’s Another Thorny Crown Series, which are paintings of an African American girl in white face.


Click for more detail about Horse in the Dark: Poems by Sanderia Faye Horse in the Dark: Poems

by Sanderia Faye
Northwestern University Press (Aug 31, 2012)
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In the next chapter of the Cave Canem/Northwestern University Poetry Prize, we enter the poetic world of Vievee Francis. Bold and skilled, Francis takes us into the still landscapes of Texas and the fluid details of the African American South. Her poems become panhandle folktales revealing the weight of memories so clear and on the cusp. Her creative tangle of metaphors, people and geography will keep the reader rooted in a good earth of extraordinary verse.


Click for more detail about Head Off & Split: Poems by Nikky Finney Head Off & Split: Poems

by Nikky Finney
TriQuarterly Books (Jan 27, 2011)
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Winner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry

The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address. 
 Artful and intense, Finney’s poems ask us to be mindful of what we fraction, fragment, cut off, dice, dishonor, or throw away, powerfully evoking both the lawless and the sublime.


Click for more detail about Where I Must Go: A Novel (Triquarterly Books) by Angela Jackson Where I Must Go: A Novel (Triquarterly Books)

by Angela Jackson
Northwestern University Press (Sep 30, 2009)
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Lyrical, penetrating, and highly charged, this novel displays a delicately tuned sense of difference and belonging. Poet Angela Jackson brings her superb sense of language and of human possibility to the story of young Magdalena Grace, whose narration takes readers through both privilege and privation at the time of the American civil rights movement. The novel moves from the privileged yet racially exclusive atmosphere of the fictional Eden University to the black neighborhoods of a Midwestern city and to ancestral Mississippi. Magdalena’s story includes a wide range of characters—black and white, male and female, favored with opportunity or denied it, the young in love and elders wise with hope. With and through each other, they struggle to understand the history they are living and making. With dazzling perceptiveness, Jackson’s narrator Magdalena tells of the complex interactions of people around her who embody the personal and the political at a crucial moment in their own lives and in the making of America.


Click for more detail about Teeth by Aracelis Girmay Teeth

by Aracelis Girmay
Curbstone Books (Jun 01, 2007)
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Winner, 2015 Whiting Award for Poetry Stunning, highly original poems that celebrate the richness of the author’s multicultural tradition, Teeth explores loves, wars, wild hope, defiance, and the spirit of creativity in a daring use of language and syntax. Behind this language one senses a powerful, inventive woman who is not afraid to tackle any subject, including rape, genocide, and love, always sustained by an optimistic voice, assuring us that in the end justice will triumph and love will persevere.LOVE,
you be the reason why
we swagger & jive,
lift the guitar, & pick up the axe.
when it is i tilt my hat to the side,
wearing colors & perfumes, it’s cause, love,
you did it to me. oh,
you do sure turn my tongue to fiddle,
& make the salt taste sweet. man,
i don’t need a rooster, or peacock even,
to help me spend my time, nope,
just you, love, right & solid as
a line.


Click for more detail about How We Sleep On The Nights We Don’t Make Love by E. Ethelbert Miller How We Sleep On The Nights We Don’t Make Love

by E. Ethelbert Miller
Curbstone Books (Apr 01, 2004)
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In this wide-ranging collection of lyrics, dealing with such themes as family, love, racism, and war, E. Ethelbert Miller sets his scenes against the backdrop of the stark realities of contemporary life, here and abroad. As both his love poems and political poems attest, Miller believes with full faith in the transformative powers of love and understanding. His poems on friendship and love are tender, often whimsical. His political poems are evenhanded and compassionate.


Click for more detail about Brown Glass Windows by Devorah Major Brown Glass Windows

by Devorah Major
Curbstone Books (Apr 01, 2002)
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Brown Glass Windows is the story of the Evermans, an African-American family in the Filmore District of San Francisco and the tragic history of their son, Ranger, who returns scarred from his experiences in Vietnam and struggles with drug addiction. Ironically, when he finally conquers his drug habit, he is killed meaninglessly in a drive-by shooting. Ranger’s death causes the family, with its suppressed recriminations and accumulated resentments, to pass through the crisis and come out on the other side of grief stronger and more united. The novel is also a kind of elegy to the old Filmore District. As Ranger says, they’ve redeveloped the neighborhood "into a little doorway to hell," a comment that will resonate deeply with readers not only in San Francisco, but in Hartford, L.A. and other urban centers throughout the country, where people have lost their once closely-knit neighborhoods either through urban decay or gentrification, or both. Brown Glass Windows is a beautifully structured book employing techniques of magical realism-a grittily realistic narrative framed by the spirit world. The novel is narrated by a spirit of a woman 200 years old, who watches over her elderly Black friend, Victoria. Victoria, a wonderfully eccentric character, who paints herself white and strives to be invisible, plays an important role in the healing of the Everman family. devorah major, an accomplished poet, invests her novel’s landscape and characters with layers of meaning without ever obfuscating the realistic surface narrative (one is reminded of Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison). Brown Glass Windows gives us a rich blend of realism and imagination, elegizing the passing of an era and presenting vibrant characters who move into the future with hope and courage.

Book Review

Click for more detail about Maroon by Danielle Legros Georges Maroon

by Danielle Legros Georges
Curbstone Books (Nov 01, 2001)
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Maroon is the debut collection of Haitian-American poet Danielle Georges who writes of the pain of exile, the beauty of nature, and the delights of love in highly rhythmic, highly original language. The range of her voice is remarkable-from the comic to the tragic to the lyric, but always her poetry is electric with an overpowering zest for life and vitality of language.


Click for more detail about Meteor in the Madhouse by Leon Forrest Meteor in the Madhouse

by Leon Forrest
TriQuarterly Books (Apr 04, 2001)
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In the wake of his watershed novel Divine Days, Leon Forest began an even more ambitious project, a collection of novellas that he hoped would be the culmination of his life’s work and of the fictional world of Forest County, which he had created in his five earlier novels. Although slowed by devastating illness in 1997, Forrest’s labor on his masterwork continued; while the novel assumed a focus tighter than he had originally intended, Forrest felt just before his untimely death that he had succeeded in bringing a unified vision to the manuscript of Meteor in the Madhouse. Meteor in the Madhouse is a novel made up of five interconnected novellas framed by an account of the last days in the life of journalist Joubert Antoine Jones, a character immortalized in Divine Days. The central relationship in the novel is that of Joubert and his adoptive kin and fellow writer Leonard Foster. A symbol of the struggle for freedom and equality, Leonard’s search for truth — leading him into political agitation, cultish religion, and eventual death from drug addiction — immerses Joubert in feelings of guilt and frustration when he is unable to save his friend and mentor. As Joubert reflects on Leonard’s death, he is both haunted and rejuvenated by the characters and episodes of their shared past. We meet the women in Joubert’s life: foster mother Lucasta Jones, whose aesthetic and erotic potential goes unfulfilled; Lucasta’s sister Gussie, irrepressible in her zest for life; and Jessie Ma Fay Battle Barker, known for her indomitable spirit and largesse. Joubert recalls his visits with Leonard and Leonard’s further breakdown in the face of humorous memories from their youth: the behavior of theDeep Brown Study Eggheads who inhabited the wonderfully diverse rooming house near Joubert’s alma mater; and the characters fre- quenting Fountain’s House of the Dead — a funeral home by day and a brothel by night. As Joubert and his relations tackle the forces of love, lust, alcohol, drugs, violence, and family, Joubert becomes the symbol of the soul’s search for authenticity. With introductions by editors John G. Cawelti and Merle Drown, Meteor in the Madhouse emerges as Forrest’s most vivid portrayal of the great diversity of urban African American life.


Click for more detail about And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New by Angela Jackson And All These Roads Be Luminous: Poems Selected and New

by Angela Jackson
TriQuarterly Books (Feb 20, 1998)
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As Angela Jackson has developed as a poet, her poetry has engaged various artistic perspectives yet always maintains a characteristic combination of compassion, grace, and daring. Drawing from earlier works contained in chapbooks, And All These Roads Be Luminous is filled with a world of characters engaged in explorations of identity, sexuality, creativity, and spirituality—all revealed through a passionate verse brimming with surprises.


Click for more detail about The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown by Sterling Brown The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown

by Sterling Brown
TriQuarterly Books (Apr 08, 1996)
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Arguably the greatest African-American poet of the century, Sterling Brown was instrumental in bringing the traditions of African-American folk life to readers all over the world. This is the definitive collection of Brown’s poems, and the only edition available in the U.S.


Click for more detail about Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners by Angela Jackson Dark Legs and Silk Kisses: The Beatitudes of the Spinners

by Angela Jackson
TriQuarterly Books (Nov 15, 1993)
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Winner of the Carl Sandburg Award for Poetry

Angela Jackson brings her remarkable linguistic and poetic gifts to the articulation of African-American experience. The recurrent motif of the spider, which she presents as both creator and predator, demonstrates her deliberate reshaping of myth in the context of contemporary human experience. Informed by African-American speech and poetic traditions, yet uniquely her own, these poems display Jackson’s stylistic grace, her exuberance and vitality of spirit, and her emotional sensitivity and psychological insight.


Click for more detail about Through the Stonecutter’s Window by Indigo Moor Through the Stonecutter’s Window

by Indigo Moor
Northwestern University Press (Jan 01, 1970)
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The inaugural winner of the Cave Canem Northwestern University Press Poetry Prize, Indigo Moor’s Through the Stonecutter’s Window is a sustained and impressive dialogue with the visual arts, history, the natural world, and the poet’s dreams and nightmares. The verse dances polyrhythmically across and down each page. Always in motion, Moor’s lines are choreographed to make sense of all that is most elusive in meaning: music, violence, love, anger, and desire.