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,...

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...

He was stillborn -- no heartbeat, declared dead by the family doctor, and put aside for later burial. Another doctor in the delivery room had an idea, and immersed the newborn in ice-cold water. The shock ca...

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...

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...

Akinwande Oluwole "Wole" Babatunde Soyinka, born 13 July 1934, is a Nigerian playwright and poet. He was the first African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1986, and two of his works, the play Death and...