Browse Items (27 total)

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Set on the south side of Chicago in the 1930s and written from post-renaissance Harlem, Richard Wright’s Native Son presents the reality of racism in the U.S. during the Jim Crow era. Following protagonist Bigger Thomas through an impoverished life…

Best known as the author of the 1952 American classic Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison didn’t see most of his work published during his lifetime. Juneteenth was published as his second novel, following his death in 1994. Originally spanning over 2,000…

Categorized as Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “dialect poems,” The Poems of Cabin and Field were written in an imagined black vernacular. Paired with staged photographs of plantation life, the poetry collection was one of the first publications to project a…