"A book of lectures by Douglas Kearney, published in the Bagley Wright lecture series"--

Understanding Suzan-Lori Parks is a critical study of a playwright and screenwriter who was the first African American woman to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. Suzan-Lori Parks is also the recipient of a MacArthur Genius Award, a Whiting Writers Award, a CalArts/Alpert Award in the Arts, two Obie Awards, and a Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts. In this book Jennifer Larson examines how Parks, through the innovative language and narratives of...

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...

"National Book Award-winner Jesmyn Ward takes James Baldwin's 1963 examination of race in America, The Fire Next Time, as a jumping off point for this groundbreaking collection of essays and poems about race from the most important voices of her generation and our time. In light of recent tragedies and widespread protests across the nation, The Progressive magazine republished one of its most famous pieces: James Baldwin's 1962 "Letter to My Nephew,"...

Herbert Woodward Martin is a prize-winning poet and performer, an actor and playwright, a singer and opera librettist, a professor, and a scholar. Born in Alabama in 1933, Martin and his family moved to Toledo, Ohio when Herbert was twelve years old. His parents appreciated literature and music and saw to it that their young son was immersed in the arts. Martin began to write poetry during his undergraduate years at the University of Toledo, from...

America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...

Mama takes her two daughters to the library every summer to pick out books about Black people so they can see the struggles, strength, and hope of people who look like them. Mama's Library Summers is a moving picture book tribute to a strong Black mother, libraries, and the power of reading and of seeing oneself in books. Every summer, Mama takes her two daughters to the library to pick out books. Not just any books--books about Black people. When...

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that...

"Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, and was raised by his grandmother, who told him many stories of the Black American experience and taught him to be proud of his race from a young age. With her guidance, Langston became a talented writer in high school, creating dramatic plays, poetry, and articles for the school paper. His career as a writer would continue to blossom. Langston pioneered jazz poetry and published nearly twenty poetry...

The Souls of Mixed Folk examines representations of mixed race in literature and the arts that redefine new millennial aesthetics and politics. Focusing on black-white mixes, Elam analyzes expressive works-novels, drama, graphic narrative, late-night television, art installations-as artistic rejoinders to the perception that post-Civil Rights politics are bereft and post-Black art is apolitical. Reorienting attention to the cultural invention of mixed...