What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorNotebook of a Return to the Native Land
Aime Cesaire · 81 pages
"Aime Cesaire is most well known as the co-creator (with Leopold Senghor) of the concept of negritude. His long poem Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, written at the end of World War II, is a masterpiece of immense cultural significance and beauty and became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by
Poems
Maya Angelou · 209 pages
Examines the life and accomplishments of the African American writer, performer, and teacher. Includes a selection of her poetry.
for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf
Ntozake Shange · 64 pages
First published in 1975, Shange's choreopoem has been read and performed because it truly revealed what it meant to be of color and female in the twentieth century. Here is the complete text, with stage directions of the dramatic prose poem that resonates with unusual beauty in its fierce message to the world.
Native Guard
Natasha Trethewey · 57 pages
Winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry, Natasha Trethewey's elegiac *Native Guard* is a deeply personal volume that brings together two legacies of the Deep South. The title of the collection refers to the Mississippi Native Guards, a black regiment whose role in the Civil War has been largely overlooked by history. As a child in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the 1960s, Trethewey could gaze a
The Collected Poetry, 1968-1998
Nikki Giovanni · 512 pages
Citizen: An American Lyric
Claudia Rankine · 160 pages
You take in things you don't want all the time. The second you hear or see some ordinary movement, all its intended targets, all the meanings behind the retreating sounds, as far as you are able to see, come into focus. Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because ju
Brown Girl Dreaming
Jacqueline Woodson · 368 pages
Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement.
Omeros
Derek Walcott · 325 pages
A poem in five books, of circular narrative design, titled with the Greek name for Homer, which simultaneously charts two currents of history: the visible history charted in events -- the tribal losses of the American Indian, the tragedy of African enslavement -- and the interior, unwritten epic fashioned from the suffering of the individual in exile.
The Gypsy Ballads of Federico Garcia Lorca
Federico Garcia Lorca · 64 pages
And Still I Rise
Maya Angelou, Linda Sunshine, Diego Rivera · 112 pages
Maya Angelou's third poetry collection, a unique celebration of life, consists of rhythms of strength, love, and remembrance, songs of the street, and lyrics of the heart.
Dust Tracks on a Road
Zora Neale Hurston · 336 pages
An exuberant account of Zora Neale Hurston's rise from poverty in the rural south to a prominent place among the leading artists and intelectuals of the Harlem Renaissance.
Cane
Jean Toomer, Rudolph P. Byrd · 224 pages
Published in 1923, Jean Toomer’s Cane was widely heralded as one of the first masterpieces of the Harlem Renaissance, and its author as “a bright morning star” of the movement. Toomer himself, however, was reluctant to embrace an explicitly racialized identity, preferring to define himself as simply an American writer. Inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s short story cycle Winesburg, Ohio , T
Selected Poems, 1966-1987
Seamus Heaney · 268 pages
A selection of poems by Irish poet Seamus Heaney, drawn from throughout the first twenty-one years of his career, from 1966 to 1987.
The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats
W.B. Yeats
Even this Page is White
Vivek Shraya · 115 pages
Vivek Shraya's debut collection of poetry is a bold and timely interrogation of skin—its origins, functions, and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday racism with words, rendering it visible, tangible and undeniable.
Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys · 189 pages
Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R
Tar Baby
Toni Morrison · 305 pages
Ravishingly beautiful and emotionally incendiary, Tar Baby is Toni Morrison's reinvention of the love story. Jadine Childs is a black fashion model with a white patron, a white boyfriend, and a coat made out of ninety perfect sealskins. Son is a black fugitive who embodies everything she loathes and desires. As Morrison follows their affair, which plays out from the Caribbean to Manhattan and the
The Rose That Grew from Concrete
Tupac Shakur · 149 pages
A collection of brilliant and intense poems, in the handwritten and typed version, by the rapper Tupac Shakur.
Maud Martha
Gwendolyn Brooks · 180 pages
September 2003 marked the 50th anniversary of Maud Martha, the only novel published by esteemed poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Initially entitled "American Family Brown" the work would eventually come to symbolize some of Brooks' most provocative writing. In a novel that captures the essence of Black life, Brooks recognizes the beauty and strength that lies within each of us.
Salt
Nayyirah Waheed · 251 pages
This collection of poetry explores the realities of multiple identities, language, diasporic life and pain, the self, community, healing, celebration, and love.
The Color Purple
Alice Walker · 274 pages
The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number seventeenth because of the sometimes explicit content, particula