Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance: Visualizing Magazines, Editors, and Poems
This site aims to visualize an exciting and complex story in Harlem Renaissance poetry -- the densely connected network of poets, editors, and magazines that helped a group of young writers find their audiences -- and each other. The focus is on poetry of the mid-1920s, the peak years of the Harlem Renaissance. The diagram above is interactive and clickable -- if you click on any given node, it should take you to either the poem it represents or background information about an editor or magazine from the period.
The information represents a limited selection of materials drawn from a larger collection, Periodical Poetry collection at African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology.
One aim of this visualization is to draw attention to voices who are sometimes overlooked in telling the story of the Harlem Renaissance -- editors like Lewis Alexander and Gwendolyn B. Bennett -- and I have also made an effort to foreground writers and editors who were women. For that reason, I have intentionally limited the presence of certain very well-known poets and editors in this diagram -- in the chart above, there are few poems by Langston Hughes, Georgia Douglas Johnson, or Countee Cullen (though Countee Cullen's editorial contributions are well-represented in the diagram).
Also, the story of the Harlem Renaissance is often told with the anthology, The New Negro, and the one-off periodical Fire!! at the center of the story. There is no doubt these were important publications, but in some ways they were just two among many interesting experiments, including the Philadelphia-based magazine Black Opals, the Boston-based Saturday Evening Quill, as well special issues of Palms and The Carolina Magazine. This visualization might help us see that larger network of publications beyond the two most frequently discussed collections.
The blue circles in the graph above are editors who were also poets themselves -- Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn B. Bennett, Lewis Alexander, and Nellie R. Bright. The red circles represent magazines (Palms, Opportunity, The Crisis, Black Opals, etc.). Note that I have not included the leading editors of those magazines as nodes themselves if they were not actively publishing poetry. Thus Charles Johnson, editor of Opportunity, is an important figurei in the Harlem Renaissance, but since he was not a poet we have not put his name on this particular diagram. Similarly, W.E.B. Du Bois was the head editor of The Crisis, but here we are more interested in Jessie Fauset's role as literary editor of the magazine in the years 1919-1926. The goal, again, is to put the focus on poets who also worked as editors.
Gwendolyn B. Bennett is typically known as a poet, though her work as a guest-editor of the December 1927 issue of the Philadelphia-based literary magazine Black Opals connected her to several other important peers as an editor.
Lewis Alexander is often only a footnote in accounts of the period today, but he was an accomplished poet, and his work editing a special issue of The Carolina Magazine dedicated to African American poetry also puts him in conversation with a large group of important poets.
Another often overlooked figure might be Nellie R. Bright, a Philadephia writer and educator who did not publish very much poetry (though she did later co-author a History textbook!). However, her work as an editor and publishing poet in Black Opals in 1927-1928 makes her an important node in this network.
Countee Cullen as a poet really needs no introduction -- he is one of the canonical figures of the Harlem Renaissance, and was recognized as such at the time. However, he too tried his hand at editing -- a special issue of the literary magazine Palms in 1926. He was also on the masthead at Opportunity between 1926 and 1928 as a literary editor. The experience of editing Palms and Opportunity led him to a more ambitious effort in 1927, when he edited Caroling Dusk, perhaps the best and most inclusive anthology of Black poetry published during the Renaissance.
Because the diagram above is based on only a fraction of periodical poetry published in the Harlem Renaissance, it should be taken as illustrative rather than an objective representation of the poetry of the period.
--Amardeep Singh, February 2025