The Cambridge History of African American Poetry provides an authoritative chronicle of the unifying world-building practices of community and artistry of African American poets in the United States since the arrival of Africans on these shores. It traces the evolution and cohesion of the tradition from the religious songs and written publications of enslaved poets who have come to be some of the most important figures in American literary culture. It conveys the stories of individual well-known figures in new ways and introduces less-well known writers and movements to clarify what makes African American poetry a cohesive tradition. It also presents a comprehensive and unique account of literary communities and artistic movements. Written by leading scholars in the field, The Cambridge History of African American Poetry offers an ambitious history of the full artistic range and social reach of the tradition.
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This first-of-its kind history offers authoritative analysis and insider perspectives on the centrality of African American poetry to American culture.
Introduction Keith D. Leonard; Part I. Beginnings:
1. An origin story
Lauri Scheyer;
2. Phillis Wheatley Peter's America Vincent Carretta;
3. 'Bury
Me in a Free Land': Black abolitionist poetics Matt Sandler;
4. Black
periodical poetics: 18591909 Eric Gardner;
5. Landscapes and local color in
the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar Margaret Ronda; Part II. Black Modernity:
6. Postbellum dreams: a generation of Black women poets Carlyn Ena Ferrari;
7. A question of form: the sonnet Timo Müller;
8. Harlem's sensuous poetics
Shane Vogel;
9. The long shadow of Langston Hughes W. Jason Miller;
10. All
that jazz: Black music as muse Michael Borshuk;
11. African American poets
and the left James Smethurst;
12. The legacies of Gwendolyn Brooks Joanne V.
Gabbin; Part III. The New Black Poetries:
13. The society of umbra and the
countercultures Jean-Phillipe Marcoux;
14. The literary lives of Amiria
Baraka William J. Harris;
15. The Black arts movement poetics of space: north
and south Margo Natalie Crawford;
16. Black arts women on wax Michael J. New;
17. Not a luxury: Black feminist poetics Alexis Pauline Gumbs;
18. A Black
cosmopolitan poetics Malin Pereira;
19. A question of form: jazz in Joans,
Kaufman, and Cortez David Grundy;
20. African American ecopoetry Marta
Werbanowska;
21. Poetry and diaspora Anthony Reed; Part IV. Building Our Own:
22. Anthologizing Black poetry, 19222022 Howard Rambsy II;
23. The
sisterhood and its legacies Courtney Thorsson;
24. 'An Avant-Garde Thing':
the African American writers' collective Keith D. Leonard;
25. What cave
canem means: an aesthetic history Evie Shockley;
26. Furious flowering: Black
poetry and institutional durability Kimberly Quiogue Andrews; Part V.
Histories of the Future:
27. Historical poetry in the twenty-first century
Annette Debo;
28. In the national spotlight: awards, inaugurations,
resistance McKinley Melton;
29. A question of form: elegy in the Black Lives
Matter era Emily Ruth Rutter;
30. Not just citizen: African American lineages
of formal renovation Meta DuEwa Jones;
Chapter
31. Hip-hop poetics Sequoia
Maner;
32. The remix: Black digital poetics DaMaris B. Hill;
33. Poetics and
being Kevin Quashie.
Keith D. Leonard is the author of Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights (2006) and has published essays on innovation and nostalgia in contemporary Black poetry and jazz in African American literature. He has also served as guest editor for special issues of Callaloo, MELUS, and Obsidian, each about poetry, politics, and activism. His current work characterizes an African American avant-garde constituted by the internal practices, institutional authority, and collective production of African American artist collectives.
