Browse Items (26 total)

Anchoring her poetic narrative in the midst of the Great Migration, Rita Dove knits together the story of Thomas and Beulah, a black couple living in the industrial and urban Midwest. Divided into two halves, the first twenty-three poems in the…

Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep, rewrites the traditional vampire narrative, shifting away from a pale creature of the night to an African immortal scholar with recuperative abilities and an unending quest for knowledge. Following protagonist…

The pages of Beloved are haunted. Operating through “rememory,” an erasure of linear time, and the ghost of protagonist Sethe’s daughter, slavery is ever-present, a specter in the pages. Recent scholarship has recognized the glimpses of science…

Jazz reverberates across the pages of Toni Morrison’s novels. Taking the techniques from this black musical tradition, rhythms, riffs, solos, and cadences emerge in Morrison’s prose as literary devices. The prose in Tar Baby is no exception. Caught…

Set on a Georgia plantation in 1832 and narrated by protagonist 47, a child born into slavery, we follow 47 as he meets a runaway slave from a nearby plantation, Tall John. Alluding to folklore, Tall John mirrors the legend of High John the…

Widely known for jazz aesthetic and musical rhythms in his poetry, Yusef Komunyakaa expands his jazz style in Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems. Komunyakaa crafted a poetry collection that moves beyond familiar jazz impulses into a new…