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- 105 votes. Langston Hughes. Fine Clothes to the Jew, Black Misery, Not Without Laughter.
- 110 votes. Maya Angelou. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Sister, Sister.
- 59 votes. Gwendolyn Brooks. In the Mecca; Poems, Annie Allen.
- 52 votes. James Baldwin. Go Tell It on the Mountain, Another Country, Notes of a Native Son.
- Maya Angelou. Acclaimed American poet, author and activist Maya Angelou was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1928. Often referred to as a spokesman for African Americans and women through her many works, her gift of words connected all people who were “committed to raising the moral standards of living in the United States.”
- James Baldwin. Though he spent most of his life living abroad to escape the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin is the quintessential American writer.
- Amiri Baraka. Born in 1934, poet, writer and political activist Amiri Baraka used his writing as a weapon against racism and became one of the most widely published African American writers.
- Octavia Butler. In a genre known for being traditionally white and male, Octavia Butler broke new ground in science fiction as an African American woman.
- Lynnette Nicholas
- Poets are interpreters. There are many types of poetry in the world, from love poems that will make you swoon to nature poems and protest poems that examine the world around us in very different ways.
- Countee Cullen. Best-known poems: “Incident” and “Heritage” Countee Cullen was one of the most significant Black poets of the Harlem Renaissance. A graduate of New York University who went on to get a master’s degree in English from Harvard, Cullen was one of the most famous voices of the early 20th century.
- Jean Toomer. Best-known poem: “Blue Meridian” Jean Toomer was a famous Black poet and novelist whose work impacted the Harlem Renaissance and modernist literary movements.
- Langston Hughes. Best-known poems: “Harlem” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” Langston Hughes isn’t just one of the most well-known Black poets of the early 20th century—he’s one of the most celebrated American poets, period.
There’s a long, and strong, tradition of African-American writing stretching back centuries, and the annals of literature are filled with amazing African-American poets and poems. Below, we introduce just ten of the very best poems by African-American poets, covering over 250 years.
- Tyehimba Jess on "We Real Cool" by Gwendolyn Brooks. "We Real Cool" is the poem so many of us know from grade school: the Seven (that sacred number of the seeker, the thinker, the mysterious) at the Golden Shovel (the shovel be golden but be ready to dig your grave).
- Safiya Sinclair on "won't you celebrate with me" by Lucille Clifton. What a balm and a blessing this poem has been to me. I have carried this sonnet—both an ode to the self and also an act of resistance—inside me like gospel, like armor.
- Rickey Laurentiis on "Heartbeats" by Melvin Dixon. “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,” said Dickinson, “I know that is poetry.”
- Rowan Ricardo Phillips on "American History" by Michael S. Harper. Michael S. Harper’s “American History” is one of the great poems of our or any other language.
Nov. 9, 2020. Throughout American history, Black people have written poetry reflecting on their lives, their struggles and their aspirations. But many of these works had been lost to time, or...
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Langston Hughes was a central figure in the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of black intellectual, literary, and artistic life that took place in the 1920s in a number of American cities, particularly Harlem. A major poet, Hughes also wrote novels, short stories, essays, and plays.
