Poetry by African American Women (1890-1930): A Reader and Guide
General Introduction:
Poetry by African American women is a vital part of the landscape of American literature -- one that is often overlooked in literary history. Between the 1890s and the 1920s, many Black women started publishing poetry, especially in African American magazines like The Crisis and Opportunity. Many authors also published single-authored books of poetry, sometimes using local and regional publishing companies. Many of these poems dealt with social and political issues related to the broader civil rights movement, race and racism, religion, and events in the news. Others were more personal, dealing with questions over motherhood, love and loss, and gender roles.
In this Reader, we're putting together a selection of compelling poems from this time period, along with biographical information about the authors as well as a sense of the historical context. Our aim is to make the poets and their poetry feel alive to a broad range of readers in the 21st century – not just academic specialists and historians. We believe these ideas and voices are still relevant to us now – from calls for racial justice and protests against discrimination and racialized violence, to queer and feminist themes.
This Reader is aimed at introductory high school and college classrooms; it is not so much a work of original scholarship as it is a synthesis of the work of scholars like Akasha Gloria Hull, Maureen Honey, Maryemma Graham, and many others (see "Further Reading" for an annotated bibliography). It is designed to be read straight through, though readers can certainly skip to areas and authors of particular interest if they choose using the Chapters and Sections below We’re breaking the collection into decades, with Chapters for 1890-1899, 1900-1909, 1910-1919, and 1920-1928. In each case, we’ll have a brief general overview of the decade in question, introductions to the major authors, and notes attached where some historical context might be helpful to understand the poems in question. Some of the poets were well-known at the time (especially Frances E.W. Harper and Georgia Douglas Johnson); others were less well-known, so working with these poems might be seen as contributing to a project of recovery.