The earliest African American poets were Jupiter Harmon, George Moses Horton, and Phillis Wheatley -- all slaves who usually wrote poetry with religious themes.
African American Poets & Poetry
Following the Civil War Paul Laurence Dunbar achieved fame with lyric and dialect poems for the most part. Both he and William Stanley Braithwaite avoided any mention of any racial injustice in their writing.
During the Harlem Renaissance James Weldon Johnson, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen all won recognition as major poets.
Contemporary poets have included Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Walker, Rita Dove, Nikki Giovanni, Audre Lorde, Jay Wright, and Maya Angelou. Dove won a Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her 1986 book Thomas and Beulah, and is currently the poet laureate of the U.S.
- Documenting African American poetry in books
- Biographical sources
- Literary criticism
- Audio recordings
- Dissertations
- Bibliographies
Related Web Sites
- The Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Maintained by the Black Alumni Chronicle of the University of Dayton (Ohio), this site celebrates the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the first African-American to gain national eminence as a poet.