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

Award-winning poet and essayist Cheryl Clarke’s illustrious career has spanned more than four decades and culminates in Archive of Style: New and Selected Poems, a long-awaited retrospective of the indelible work of a Black feminist, community and LGBTQ activist, and educator. This collection features carefully curated poems from Narratives: Poems in the Tradition of Black Women (1982), Living as a Lesbian (1986), The Days of Good Looks: Prose and Poetry 1980-2005 (2006), By My Precise Haircut (2016), and Targets (2019). Together these works show a brilliant thinker who has profoundly impacted generations of writers and activists.

Clarke’s poetry and essays, centered around the Black, lesbian, feminist experience, have attracted an audience around the world. Her essays, "Lesbianism: an Act of Resistance" and "The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community," revolutionized the thinking about lesbians of color and the struggle against homophobia. Her poetry and non-fiction have been reprinted in numerous anthologies and assigned in women and sexuality courses globally. Having published since 1977, Clarke and her work have become a foundational part of LGBTQ literature and activism. Archive of Style is a celebration and homage to one of American literature’s Black Women literary warriors.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

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

This is an anthology of poems in the Age of Trump—and much more than Trump. These are poems that either embody or express a sense of empathy or outrage, both prior to and following his election, since it is empathy the president lacks and outrage he provokes.

There is an extraordinary diversity of voices here. The ninety-three poets featured include Elizabeth Alexander, Julia Alvarez, Richard Blanco, Carolyn Forché, Aracelis Girmay, Donald Hall, Juan Felipe Herrera, Yusef Komunyakaa, Naomi Shihab Nye, Marge Piercy, Robert Pinsky, Danez Smith, Patricia Smith, Brian Turner, Ocean Vuong, Bruce Weigl, and Eleanor Wilner. They speak of persecuted and scapegoated immigrants. They bear witness to violence: police brutality against African Americans, mass shootings in a school or synagogue, the rage inflicted on women everywhere. They testify to poverty: the waitress surviving on leftovers at the restaurant, the battles of a teacher in a shelter for homeless mothers, the emergency-room doctor listening to the heartbeats of his patients. There are voices of labor, in the factory and the fields. There are prophetic voices, imploring us to imagine the world we will leave behind in ruins lest we speak and act.

However, this is not merely a collection of grievances. The poets build bridges. One poet steps up to translate in Arabic at the airport; another walks through the city and sees her immigrant past in the immigrant present; another declaims a musical manifesto after the hurricane that devastated his island; another evokes a demonstration in the street, shouting in an ecstasy of defiance. The poets take back the language, resisting the demagogic corruption of words themselves. They assert our common humanity in the face of dehumanization.

”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.

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.

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.

"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

The End of Chiraq: A Literary Mixtape is a collection of poems, rap lyrics, short stories, essays, interviews, and artwork about Chicago, the city that came to be known as “Chiraq” (“Chicago” + “Iraq”), and the people who live in its vibrant and occasionally violent neighborhoods. Tuned to the work of Chicago’s youth, especially the emerging artists and activists surrounding Young Chicago Authors, this literary mixtape unpacks the meanings of “Chiraq” as both a vexed term and a space of possibility.

“Chiraq” has come to connote the violence—interpersonal and structural—that many Chicago youth regularly experience. But the contributors to The End of Chiraq show that Chicago is much more than Chiraq. Instead, they demonstrate how young people are thinking and mobilizing, engaged in a process of creating a new and safer world for themselves, their communities, and their city.

In true mixtape fashion, the book is an exercise in “low end theory” that does not just include so-called underground and marginal voices, but foregrounds them. Edited by award-winning poets, writers, and teachers Javon Johnson and Kevin Coval, The End of Chiraq addresses head-on the troublesome relationship between Chicago and Chiraq and envisions a future in which both might be transformed.

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.

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.

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.

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. "

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.

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."

"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.

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.

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.

It’s summer on the South Side of Chicago, and ten-year-old boys Earl and Wilford are frequently courtside watching their role model Nathaniel “Cornbread” Hamilton as he prepares to leave for college on a basketball scholarship. Their world comes crashing down in an alley when two cops—one white, one black—mistake Cornbread for a fleeing burglary suspect. What follows threatens to tear apart the community. Earl and Wilford know what happened, but will they stand up for their hero in a city in which power trumps justice, and each player must decide whether to fold to the system, or risk losing it all?

Instantly recognized as a gritty classic when it was first published in 1966, Hog Butcher was later adapted for the 1975 film Cornbread, Earl and Me. This new edition brings back into print Fair’s startlingly relevant indictment of Chicago’s inequalities.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.