The flourishing of pre-Civil War literature known as the American Renaissance occurred in a volatile context of national expansion and sectional strife. Canonical writers such as Herman Melville, Walt ...

Audre Lorde (1934–1992), the author of eleven books of poetry, described herself as a “Black feminist lesbian poet warrior mother,” but she added that this phrase was inadequate in capturing her full ident ...

In 1982, one year after graduating from Brooklyn College, Gloria Naylor (b. 1950) made her debut on the literary scene with The Women of Brewster Place. The novel was critically acclaimed, filmed as a ...

Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooks features sparkling interviews with one of America's most valued poets. Throughout this book, which spans three decades, Brooks (1917-2000) speaks with simplicity, depth, ...

In 1993, Rita Dove (b. 1952) became the nation’s youngest and first female African American Poet Laureate. This collection of interviews offers a fascinating portrait of her.

Having published over a half-dozen ...

The Mississippi river country from Vicksburg to Natchez was a source and a setting for several of Eudora Welty's early stories and for her novel The Robber Bridegroom. Her eloquent essay about this region, ...

Margaret Walker (1915-1998) began her writing career as a poet in the late 1930s. But she was cast into the limelight in 1966 when her novel Jubilee was published to wide critical and commercial acclaim. ...

For over forty years, Clarence Major (b. 1936) has engaged several artistic and literary pursuits, garnering acclaim for his paintings, edited anthologies, poetry collections, essays, and novels.

His ...

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's novels have almost exclusively been examined as sagas illuminating history, race, culture, and gender politics. This gathering of eight essays by top scholars probes Morrison's ...

Winner of the 1999 Eudora Welty Prize

Angela Davis, Assata Shakur (a.k.a. JoAnne Chesimard), and Elaine Brown are the only women activists of the Black Power movement who have published book-length autobiographies. ...