African American Poetry: A Digital Anthology

Poetry for Children

Poetry intended for children is a small but growing part of the collections on this site. The majority of the materials linked to below are from The Brownies' Book, a magazine published in 1920-1921 by W.E.B. Du Bois, with Jessie Fauset as the Managing Editor. In the near future, we also intend to include poems published in The Crisis, on the "Little Page," a page edited and typically authored by Effie Lee Newsome. "The Little Page" was a feature of The Crisis through much of the mid-1920s, and reflects an awareness of how the magazine was typically read in African American communities.

Alongside The Brownies' Book and "The Little Page" in The Crisis, we are also including a plain text version of an anthology called The Dunbar Speaker and Entertainer published in 1920, which is marketed to "youthful" readers (though it is not exactly "children's literature"). 

In 1932, Langston Hughes would publish a volume intended for children, The Dream Keeper and other poems, which contained some of his early writing in The Brownies' Book as well as poems written later. (That collection is currently still in copyright.) 

 

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