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- 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.
- Etheridge Knight. Etheridge Knight is a black poet with a fascinating story. He started writing poetry while he was jailed in the Indiana State Prison.
- Lucille Clifton. Lucille Clifton was an African American poet who, between 1979 and 1985, was Poet Laureate of Maryland. She was twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and won several awards such as the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, National Book Award for Poetry, and Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.
- Yusef Komunyakaa. Yusef Komunyakaa is a poet who grew up during the Civil Rights movement’s commencement and started writing in 1973. As a result, his poetry focuses on the suffering of black people.
- Langston Hughes. Langston Hughes is undoubtedly one of the most important figures in international literature and a symbol in Harlem Renaissance. He was one of the first jazz-poetry innovators and the vast majority of his poems talk about the struggles of black people.
- Angelou, Maya. Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson, was a Pulitzer Prize-winning African American poet. She was born in St. Louis, Missouri, on April 8 1928 and died in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on May 28, 2014.
- Hughes, Langston. Langston Hughes was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, short story writer, and newspaper columnist.
- Shakur, Tupac. Tupac Shakur, born in New York City, New York on June 16, 1971, was an American rapper. Shakur sold over 75 million albums worldwide, making him one of the best-selling music artists in the world.
- Walker, Alice. Alice Walker is an American poet, activist, author and feminist. She is one of the most celebrated in modern history.
- Robert Hayden
- Paul Laurence Dunbar
- Derek Walcott
- Claude Mckay
- Gwendolyn Brooks
- Audre Lorde
- Nikki Giovanni
- Phillis Wheatley
- Langston Hughes
- Maya Angelou
Born Asa Bundy Sheffey in Detroit, Michigan, Robert Hayden was an African American poet whose subject matter was often the black experience. He extensively studied American history and his poems often reflect his deep knowledge of the same. The first poetry collection of Hayden, Heart-Shape in the Dust, was published in 1940, when he was 27 years o...
Paul Laurence Dunbar was born in Dayton, Ohio to parents who had been freed due to theAmerican Civil War. His talent was apparent from a young age. He wrote his first poem at the age of 6 and gave his first public recital at the age of 9. In 1888, when he was16, his poems“Our Martyred Soldiers” and “On The River” werefirst published in Dayton’s The...
Born on the island of Saint Lucia, a former British colony in the West Indies, Derek Walcott initially trained to be a painter but soon turned to writing. At the age of 14, his first poem was published in the newspaper The Voice of St Lucia. Walcott gained international renown with his poetry collection In a Green Night: Poems 1948-1960 (1962). The...
Born inClarendon Parish, Jamaica, Claude McKay started to write poetry at the age of 10 and he published his first book of poems, Songs of Jamaica, in 1912. The same year he left for the United States to attend Tuskegee Institute. In the 1920s, McKay became involved in the Harlem Renaissance; an African American movement which was centered at the H...
Born in in Topeka, Kansas, Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks began writing poetry from an early age and by the time she graduated from high school in 1935, she was already a regular contributor to the newspaper The Chicago Defender. Her first poem “Eventide” was published in the children’s magazine, American Childhood, when she was 13. Her first collectio...
Born inNew York City to Caribbean immigrants, Audre Lorde attended the Hunter College High School, a secondary school for intellectually gifted students. While there, she published her first poem in Seventeen magazine. In 1968, The First Cities, her first poetry collection was published. In 1973, her collection of poems, From a Land Where Other Peo...
Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Nikki Giovanni is one of the foremost poets of America. Her early poetry was inspired by the Civil Rights Movement and the Black Power Movement in the United States, which were fought for the rights of African Americans. These works provide a strong, militant African-American perspective due to which Giovanni has been ...
Phillis Wheatley was captured and sold to slavery when she was seven years old. On July 11, 1761, she was brought to Boston, Massachusetts on a slave ship called The Phillis. She was then sold toJohn Wheatley, a wealthy Boston merchant, who bought her as a servant for his wife Susanna. The Wheatleys named the 8 year old girl Phillis after the ship ...
James Mercer Langston Hughes was born in Joplin in the American state of Missouri. His ancestry was mixed. He wrote his most famous poem, The Negro Speaks of Rivers, at the age of 17. The poem was published in the June 1921 issue of the magazine The Crisis. In 1925, while working as a busboy in a hotel in Washington, D.C., Hughes showed his poems t...
Born Marguerite Annie Johnson, Maya Angelou was one of the most renowned figures of the 20th century. She began her career as a singer and dancer; worked as a civil rights activist and journalist; wrote seven acclaimed autobiographies; taught at Wake Forest University; and received many honors including the 2010 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the h...
- Hope Wabuke
- Gwendolyn Brooks. Brooks, who was the poet laureate of Illinois, became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her second collection, Annie Allen.
- Langston Hughes. “What happens to a dream deferred?” asked Hughes in one of his best-known lines. His name became synonymous with the Harlem Renaissance, and his work has inspired subsequent generations of black poets.
- Audre Lorde. The unapologetic Lorde is equally known for her poetry and essays. In every medium, she transcended form and used words to dismantle systems of oppression.
- Rita Dove. A Pulitzer Prize winner and the country’s first black poet laureate, Dove deftly weaves together subject matter that is both personal and political.
1. Phillis Wheatley, ‘ On Being Brought from Africa to America ’. ’Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land, Taught my benighted soul to understand. That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too: Once I redemption neither sought nor knew …
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1 Langston Hughes. 2 Maya Angelou. 3 Paul Laurence Dunbar. 4 Audre Lorde. 5 Gwendolyn Brooks. 6 Nikki Giovanni. 7 Phillis Wheatley. 8 Lucille Clifton. 9 Robert Hayden. 10 James Weldon Johnson. 11 Claude McKay. 12 Rita Dove. Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri in February of 1901. Most of Hughes’ childhood was spent in Lawrence, Kansas.
