Celebrating Contemporary Black Poets: Home

Celebrating Contemporary Black Poets aims to center and share the works of today's vital Black artists. This Libguide does not claim to be comprehensive, however. We hope that readers will contact us with authors to include so that this project may flourish into a true community effort. We look forward to hearing from you.

In the words of Toni Morrison:

Living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression presents a singular landscape for a writer. When this world view is taken seriously as agency, the literature produced within and without it offers an unprecedented opportunity to comprehend the resilience and gravity, the inadequacy and the force of the imaginative act. . . .

Over and over again I am amazed by the treasure trove that American literature is. How compelling is the study of those writers who take responsibility for all of the values they bring to their art. How stunning is the achievement of those who have searched for and mined a shareable language of words to say it. (Playing in the Dark, xiii)