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• 1 2024-07-16T11:14:36-04:00 Poetry by African American Women (1890-1930): A Reader and Guide 19 Open access textbook introducing readers to Poetry by Black Women plain 2024-07-29T14:36:31-04:00 The majority of the text of this Open-Access Reader was written by Amardeep Singh; some sections (labeled as such) were written by Sarah Thompson. Sarah Thompson also gave considerable input regarding the selection of poems and thematic organization. How to Cite. Send us Feedback (Google Forms link)
  
  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. 
• 1 2024-03-13T11:47:34-04:00 Mae V. Cowdery (Mae Cowdery): Author Page 7 Mae V. Cowdery Author Bio and a Collection of Her Poems plain 2024-06-03T13:47:16-04:00
  The following biography was researched and written by Sarah Thompson, June 2024.
  
  Mae Virginia Cowdery (1904 -1953) was an American poet from the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania area, born to a social worker mother and Lemuel Cowdery, a postal worker and caterer. Raised as the only child in an upwardly mobile middle-class family, she was instilled with the belief that racial equality was an essential project of the arts and letters. 
  
  Cowdery attended Philadelphia High School and enrolled in Brooklyn Pratt Institute as an art student in the fall of 1927. While still a senior in high school, she befriended Langston Hughes (then enrolled as an undergraduate at Lincoln University, in the Philadelphia suburbs), and published three poems in the inaugural and following issues of Black Opals, a Philadelphia literary magazine. She contributed many different types of poems to Black Opals such as reflections on youth (see “Time”) and expressions of progress and racial uplift (see “Goal”). 
  
  Her early work garnered significant recognition. In 1927, Cowdery won the first prize in a poetry contest in The Crisis for her poem “Longings” which evokes a profound yearning for connection with nature, cultural heritage, physical freedom, and spiritual transcendence. Additionally, her poem “Lamps” won the Krigwa Prize; this poem uses the metaphor of lamps to reflect on the diversity but common fragility of human life. Hughes encouraged Cowdery to submit both poems despite, or perhaps because of, their lack of traditional form. Also worthy of note is Cowdery’s poem “Dusk” published originally in the important anthology Ebony and Topaz (1927), where she personifies the evening as an intangible yet beautiful figure.  
   
  In 1936, Cowdery finally published her first and only poetry collection We Lift Our Voices: And Other Poems. 
  
  Cowdery’s poetry is said to be influenced by Edna St. Vincent Millay, whom she may have known during her years in Greenwich Village where she lived during her time in New York City. Her work is said to reflect the imagism of Grimke and other Modernist poets. However, Cowdery’s work is specifically known for its sensual and erotic qualities, with several poems addressed to female lovers. 
  
  Despite her contribution to the late Harlem Renaissance, little is known about Cowdery’s personal life. Most biographers focus on her distinctive fashion style and the impact of her poetry. Her style was known to be androgynous, most iconically photographed in tailored suits and a bow tie with her hair slicked back. Reputationally, some have compared Cowdery to her older contemporaries like Jessie Fauset and Zora Neale Hurston who also built a reputation through publishing their work in African American journals. 
  
  Works Cited 
  
  Honey, Maureen. Aphrodite’s Daughters: Three Modernist Poets of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers 
        University Press, 2016.
  Honey, Maureen. Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance. Rutgers University   
        Press, 2006. 
  Wintz, Cary D., and Paul Finkelman. Encyclopedia of the Harlem 
        Renaissance. Fitzroy Dearborn, 2005. 
   
• 1 2022-01-19T09:41:34-05:00 Queer and Homoerotic Poetry 4 African American Poetry Exploring Queer and Homoerotic Themes plain 2024-05-15T12:06:15-04:00 Here we are collecting writings by Black writers that explicitly thematize same sex desire, queer desire, or LGBTQIA identities.
  
  Writers like Countee Cullen, Richard Bruce Nugent, and Alain Locke have been described by biographers as gay; several of their peers might today be understood as queer or bisexual (i.e., Langston Hughes and Claude McKay). The writer Angelina Weld Grimke is thought to have had a relationship with a woman as a teenager; not much is known about her personal life as an adult.  Other writers who are thought to have had queer relationships at various points in their lives are Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Mae V. Cowdery. 
  
  By and large, we have thus far been largely only tagging poems where there is a clear queer or homoerotic element in the text itself; we have not, generally, been tagging all poems by Countee Cullen or Angelina W. Grimke as "queer." Over the summer of 2024, we will continue to review this and perhaps expand the range of poems that fall under this tag.
  
  There is an excellent overview of "The Harlem Renaissance in Black Queer History" here. 
  
  --Amardeep Singh, May 2024