Black Poets

“I wanted to understand my people. I wanted to understand what it meant to be a . What the qualities of life were. With their imagination, they combine two great loves: the love of words and the love of life....

I dream a world... where wretchedness will hang its head, and joy like a pearl, attends the needs of all mankind. Of such I dream, my world! Langston Hughes, best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance,...

Phillis Wheatley was the first published African-American female poet. She was born in West Africa around 1753, before she was kidnapped and sold into the Maafa (slavery) at the tender age of seven or eight. He...

Gil Scott-Heron was the African American poet, novelist, musician, and songwriter known primarily for his work as a spoken-word performer in the 1970s and 1980s. His syncopated spoken style and critiques of pol...

Poet João da Cruz e Sousa, (November 24, 1861-March 19, 1898) was the leading figure of the Symbolist movement in Brazil. Called the Cisne Negro (“Black Swan”) by his contemporaries, his poetry weds the te...

Frances E.W. Harper was a leading African-American poet and writer. She was also an ardent activist in the abolitionist and women's rights movements. Harper had a long and prolific career, publishing her first ...

Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American poet best known for his radical sonnet "If We Must Die," the most militant poem of the Harlem Renaissance. Mckay, a key figure of the Renaissance was recognised as the art...

Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley or “Miss Lou” was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, writer, activist, radio and television personality and educator. Writing and performing her poems in Jamaican Patois, she was in...

Quincy Thomas Troupe, Jr. is an awarding-winning African-American author of ten volumes of poetry, three children’s books, and six non-fiction works. Troupe was California's first official poet laureate. In 2...

Mari Evans (born July 16, 1923) is an African-American poet. She is a much anthologized poet, whose work has appeared in more than one hundred anthologies. In 1984 she edited one of the first critical books dev...