Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry
by Alice Walker, Wanda Coleman, Major Jackson, Elizabeth Alexander, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claudia Rankine, Alvin Aubert, Ravi Howard, Anthony Walton, Nikki Giovanni, Richard Wright, Sean Hill, Ishmael Reed, Kwame Alexander, Anne Spencer, Terrance Hayes, Langston Hughes, Patricia Smith, James Weldon Johnson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Jean Toomer, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Phillis Wheatley, Ross Gay, Margaret Walker, Evie Shockley, Ruth Ellen Kocher, Claude McKay, Melvin Dixon, Rita Dove, Janice N. Harrington, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, Camille T. Dungy, Clarence Major, Marilyn Nelson, Michael S. Harper, Carl Phillips, Lucille Clifton, Arna Bontemps, Harryette Mullen, Natasha Trethewey, Yusef Komunyakaa, Amaud Jamaul Johnson, Frank Walker, Mark McMorris, Gwendo
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Black Nature is the first anthology to focus on nature writing by African American poets, a genre that until now has not commonly been counted as one in which African American poets have participated.
Black poets have a long tradition of incorporating treatments of the natural world into their work, but it is often read as political, historical, or protest poetry―anything but nature poetry. This is particularly true when the definition of what constitutes nature writing is limited to work about the pastoral or the wild.
Camille T. Dungy has selected 180 poems from 93 poets that provide unique perspectives on American social and literary history to broaden our concept of nature poetry and African American poetics. This collection features major writers such as Phillis Wheatley, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Wanda Coleman, Natasha Trethewey, and Melvin B. Tolson as well as newer talents such as Douglas Kearney, Major Jackson, and Janice Harrington. Included are poets writing out of slavery, Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century African American poetic movements.
Black Nature brings to the fore a neglected and vital means of considering poetry by African Americans and nature-related poetry as a whole.
A Friends Fund Publication.
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