theblackbottom

Wanda Phipps is a writer/performer living in NYC and born in Washington, D.C.  She studied theater and English literature at Barnard College of Columbia University in New York City, acting at American Conservatory Theatre in San Francisco, CA and poetry at Naropa Institute in Boulder, CO.  She is the author of Field of Wanting:Poems of Desire (BlazeVOX[books]), Wake-Up Calls:66 [...]

Claudia Rankine was born in Jamaica in 1963. She earned her B.A. in English from Williams College and her M.F.A. in poetry from Columbia University. She is the author of four collections of poetry, including Don’t Let Me Be Lonely (Graywolf 2004); PLOT (2001); The End of the Alphabet (1998); and Nothing in Nature is [...]

Tim Seibles is an extraordinary poet and dynamic reader. He has been honored with many grants and awards, including an Open Voice Award and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center.
Born in Philadelphia in 1955 to a high school English teacher and a biochemist for the Department [...]

Lita Hooper is a poet, playwright and educator. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Crux: Conversations in Words and Images from South Africa to South USA (2008), The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2008), Gathering Ground: A Reader Celebrating Cave Canem First Decade (2006), Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social [...]

Toi Derricotte was born in Hamtramck, Michigan, in 1941. Her books of poetry are Tender (1997), winner of the 1998 Paterson Poetry Prize; Captivity (1989); Natural Birth (1983); and The Empress of the Death House (1978). Her The Black Notebooks, a literary memoir (W.W. Norton, 1997), won the 1998 Anisfield-Wolf Book [...]

This is a VIDEO POEM about being a YOUNG BLACK MAN in SAGINAW MICHIGAN. Many young men in my hometown are lost and struggle with lack of guidance, lack of resources and bleak alternatives… THIS IS NOT MY LIFE, rather what could have VERY EASILY been it…

(Via www.youtube.com)

Paul Laurence Dunbar was the first African-American to gain national eminence as a poet. Born in 1872 in Dayton, Ohio, he was the son of ex-slaves and classmate to Orville Wright of aviation fame.
Although he lived to [...]

Harryette Mullen’s poetry collection Recyclopedia (Graywolf 2006) won a PEN Beyond Margins Award in 2007. Her previous book, Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002) was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2005 she was awarded a fellowship from the John [...]

Tracy K. Smith was raised in Northern California. She received degrees in English and Creative Writing from Harvard College and Columbia University, and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in poetry at Stanford University from 1997-99. Her first collection of poems, The Body’s Question, was awarded the 2002 Cave Canem Poetry Prize by Kevin Young, and [...]

CORNELIUS EADY is the author of eight books of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (Putnam, April 2008). His second book, Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, won the Lamont Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1985; in 2001 Brutal Imagination was a finalist for the National [...]