San Antonio College Library

"Frances Harper was renowned in her lifetime not only as an activist who rallied on behalf of blacks, women, and the poor, but as a pioneer of the tradition of 'protest' literature, whose immense popularity did much to develop an audience for poetry in America. This collection of her poems is drawn from ten volumes published between 1854 and 1901. Their main issues are oppression, Christianity, and social and moral reform. Consolidating the oral tradition...

"In a cascade of language--ordinary speech, preaching, song, banter, erudition--motherlove, paternal protection, saintliness, the healing impulse, all spiral into regions of horror and grotesque inconsistencies with consequences as contemporary as headlines ... and as eternal as folklore, myth, and religion."--Jacket.

"Collected here for the first time are more than three hundred poems from one of this country's major and most influential poets, representing the complete oeuvre of Audre Lorde's poetry. Lorde published nine volumes of poetry which, in her words, detail "a linguistic and emotional tour through the conflicts, fears, and hopes of the world I have inhabited." Included here are Lorde's early, previously unavailable works: The First Cities, The New York...

In these brilliant poems, Rita Dove treats us to a panoply of human endeavor, shot through with the electrifying jazz of her lyric elegance. From the opening sequence, "Cameos," to the civil rights struggle of the final sequence, she explores the intersection of individual fate and history.

For the first time ever, the complete poetry collection spanning three decades from Nikki Giovanni, renowned poet and one of America's national treasures. When her poems first emerged during the Black Arts Movement, in the 1960s, Nikki Giovanni immediately took her place among the most celebrated, controversial and influential poets of the era. Now, more than thirty years later, Giovanni still stands as one of the most commanding, luminous voices...

Drawing from earlier works contained in the chapbooks VooDoo/Love Magic, The Greenville Club, Solo in the Boxcar Third Floor E, and The Man with the White Liver, And All These Roads Be Luminous is filled with an impressive variety of characters engaged in compelling explorations of identity, creativity, spiritual experience, and the rites and rituals of race and sexuality. Jackson moves with ease from the personal to the historical: filled alternately...

A Brilliant Narrative in Verse, Slave Moth follows Varl, a slave girl on the Perry Plantation in Tennessee, on her path to freedom. Varl has learned to read and write and is wildly creative, wise beyond her years, and full of love: for her Mamalee (who educates runaway slaves); for her friends, especially the handsome Dob; and for the cotton fields she has explored throughout her childhood. More than anything, Varl loves words and the freedom they...

A literary and visual narrative on the identity and representation issues being faced by today's African Americans features photographs and poetry to challenge media stereotypes and share insight into twenty-first-century black life.

In the shadow of the American Revolution, a young, African American woman named Phillis Wheatley published a book of poetry, Poems on various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773). When Wheatley's book appeared, her words would challenge Western prejudices about African and female intellectual capabilities. Her words would astound many and irritate others, but one thing was clear: this young woman was extraordinary. Based on fifteen years of archival...