A literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present Only now, in the 21st century, can we fully grasp the breadth and range of African American poetry: a magnificent chorus of voices, some familiar, others recently rescued from neglect. Here, in this unprecedented anthology expertly selected by poet and scholar Kevin Young, this precious living heritage is revealed in all its power, beauty, and multiplicity. Discover, in these pages, how an enslaved person like Phillis Wheatley confronted her legal status in verse and how an antebellum activist like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper voiced her own passionate resistance to slavery. Read nuanced, provocative poetic meditations on identity and self-assertion stretching from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Amiri Baraka to Lucille Clifton and beyond. Experience the transformation of poetic modernism in the works of figures such as Langston Hughes, Fenton Johnson, and Jean Toomer. Understand the threads of poetic history--in movements such as the Harlem and Chicago Renaissances, Black Arts, Cave Canem, Dark Noise Collective--and the complex bonds of solidarity and dialogue among poets across time and place. See how these poets have celebrated their African heritage and have connected with other communities in the African Diaspora. Enjoy the varied but distinctly Black music of a tradition that draws deeply from jazz, hip hop, and the rhythms and cadences of the pulpit, the barbershop, and the street. And appreciate, in the anthology's concluding sections, why contemporary African American poetry, amply recognized in recent National Book Awards and Poet Laureates, is flourishing as never before. Taking the measure of the tradition in a single indispensable volume, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song sets a new standard for a genuinely deep engagement with Black poetry and its essential expression of American genius.

For about as long as there has been a Texas there have been Texas mysteries, and many of them remain unsolved. What happened to the documents captured in the Alamo? Does a ghost actually haunt the state capitol in Austin? Did the U.S. Army secretly bury hundreds of guns in North Texas after WWII? Was John Wilkes Booth killed or did he escape and flee to Central Texas? The authors present the known facts and circumstances of these and other mysteries.

Movements, Motions, Moments shows how African Americans have negotiated their participation and engagement in religious spaces. The book is divided into three sections—Movements, Motions, and Moments. Images of figures including Rev. Henry Highland Garnett, Noble Drew Ali, Father Divine, Prophet Elijah Muhammad, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rev. Pauli Murray, Bishop Myokei Cain-Barrett, and others are depicted next to photographs of religious celebrations, ritual practices, and individual moments of faith and spirituality. Photographers include Lola Flash, Chester Higgins, Jason Miccolo Johnson, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, Kenneth Royster, James Van Der Zee, Milton Williams, Lloyd W. Yearwood, and others. Photographs in this volume range from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries and include religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, African indigenous, non-secular, and other religious traditions (Humanism, Atheism, Spiritualism, and others). It also includes photography capturing contemporary events and movements including Black Lives Matter and the global pandemic.

Ever since its first flowering in the 1920s, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry, and this anthology offers a treasury of poems as varied and vital as the music that inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat Movement, from the poets of the New York School to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force. We hear it the poems of Langston Hughes, e.e. cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyaka, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty and C.D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and also poems that themselves throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

Delivered in Young's classic bluesy tone, this powerful collection of poems about the American family, smoky Southern food, and the losses that time inevitably brings "bristles with life, nerve and, best of all, wit" ("San Francisco Chronicle).
"

In this fully updated and revised new edition of his landmark study of violence in and around contemporary sport, Kevin Young offers a comprehensive sociological analysis of an issue of central importance within sport studies. The book explores organised and spontaneous violence, both on the field and off, and calls for a much broader definition of 'sports-related violence', to include issues as diverse as criminal behaviour by players, abuse within sport and exploitative labour practices. Offering a sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding violence in a sporting context and including new case studies and updated empirical data - from professional soccer in Europe to ice hockey in North America - the book establishes a benchmark for the study of violence within sport and wider society. Through close examination of often contradictory trends, from anti-violence initiatives in professional sports leagues to the role of the media in encouraging hyper-aggression, the book throws new light on our understanding of the socially-embedded character of sport and its fundamental ties to history, culture, politics, social class, gender and the law. This new edition also recognises burgeoning new literatures, such as research examining concussion and the link between sport and mental illness and includes student-friendly pedagogical aids, such as critical thinking questions at the end of each chapter. Sport, Violence and Society is a vital read for anyone studying or working in the areas of the Sociology of Sport, Sport Psychology, Ethics and Philosophy of Sport, Sport and Politics, Sports History, and Sport and the Media.

Winner of the 2013 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award for Poetry

""The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010" may be the most important book of poetry to appear in years."--"Publishers Weekly"

"All poetry readers will want to own this book; almost everything is in it."--"Publishers Weekly"

"If you only read one poetry book in 2012, "The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton" ought to be it."--NPR

"The 'Collected Clifton' is a gift, not just for her fans...but for all of us."--"The Washington Post"

"The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton--both the woman and her poetry--is constant and deeply felt. The lines that surface most frequently in praise of her work and her person are moving declarations of racial pride, courage, steadfastness."--Toni Morrison, from the Foreword

"The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010" combines all eleven of Lucille Clifton's published collections with more than fifty previously unpublished poems. The unpublished poems feature early poems from 1965-1969, a collection-in-progress titled "the book of days" (2008), and a poignant selection of final poems. An insightful foreword by Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison and comprehensive afterword by noted poet Kevin Young frames Clifton's lifetime body of work, providing the definitive statement about this major America poet's career.

On February 13, 2010, the poetry world lost one of its most distinguished members with the passing of Lucille Clifton. In the last year of her life, she was named the first African American woman to receive the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize honoring a US poet whose "lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition," and was posthumously awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement from the Poetry Society of America.

"mother-tongue: to man-kind" (from the unpublished "the book of days"):

"all that I am asking is
that you see me as something
more than a common occurrence,
more than a woman in her ordinary skin."

"The Art of Losing "is the first anthology of its kind, delivering poetry with a purpose. Editor Kevin Young has introduced and selected 150 devastatingly beautiful poems that embrace the pain and heartbreak of mourning. Divided into five sections (Reckoning, Remembrance, Rituals, Recovery, and Redemption), with poems by some of our most beloved poets as well as the best of the current generation of poets, "The Art of Losing" is the ideal gift for a loved one in a time of need and for use by therapists, ministers, rabbis, and palliative care workers who tend to those who are experiencing loss. Among the poets included: Elizabeth Alexander, W. H. Auden, Amy Clampitt, Billy Collins, Emily Dickinson, Louise Gluck, Ted Hughes, Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch, Philip Larkin, Li-Young Lee, Philip Levine, Marianne Moore, Sharon Olds, Mary Oliver, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, Wallace Stevens, Dylan Thomas, Derek Walcott, and James Wright.

In this fully updated and revised new edition of his landmark study of violence in and around contemporary sport, Kevin Young offers a comprehensive sociological analysis of an issue of central importance within sport studies. The book explores organised and spontaneous violence, both on the field and off, and calls for a much broader definition of 'sports-related violence', to include issues as diverse as criminal behaviour by players, abuse within sport and exploitative labour practices. Offering a sophisticated theoretical framework for understanding violence in a sporting context and including new case studies and updated empirical data - from professional soccer in Europe to ice hockey in North America - the book establishes a benchmark for the study of violence within sport and wider society. Through close examination of often contradictory trends, from anti-violence initiatives in professional sports leagues to the role of the media in encouraging hyper-aggression, the book throws new light on our understanding of the socially-embedded character of sport and its fundamental ties to history, culture, politics, social class, gender and the law. This new edition also recognises burgeoning new literatures, such as research examining concussion and the link between sport and mental illness and includes student-friendly pedagogical aids, such as critical thinking questions at the end of each chapter. Sport, Violence and Society is a vital read for anyone studying or working in the areas of the Sociology of Sport, Sport Psychology, Ethics and Philosophy of Sport, Sport and Politics, Sports History, and Sport and the Media.

A groundbreaking collection of abolitionist writing from throughout the history of American slavery From the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade to the ambiguity of the reconstruction era, resistance and protest writing were a central part of slavery in America, and - ultimately - played a crucial role in its abolition. Placing well-known abolitionist writing alongside less celebrated and little-known accounts of everyday lives and activism, Unsung makes the case for focusing on the histories of black people as agents and architects of their own struggle and ultimate liberation.

Description

Riding the Edge is about the author's struggles through life in dealing with his bipolar disease coupled with attention deficit disorder. There is humor and sadness to the book but it is a life truly lived on the edge.

About the Author

Kevin Young, born in 1963, has lived with bipolar disease all his life but was not diagnosed as such until 2009. How bipolar affected his life can be both sad and humorous. Learning to live with the disease without going over the edge is the hardest part.

From action to comedy, from daydreams to parables, New Visions is an anthology of Christian comics celebrating a diversity of talents and tales Featuring the talents of Ralph Ellis Miley, Clint Deron Johnson, Kevin Yong, Alica Muldrow, Bill Maus, Lisa Hutchinson, Ceasar Rodriguez, Steve Firchow, Javier Laparra, Linda Brown, Eric Jansen, Kevin Dzuban, Yuniel Mendez, and Montos

The latest installment of the yearly anthology of contemporary American poetry that has achieved brand-name status in the literary world.

Most Way Home is the incandescent first collection by award-winning poet Kevin Young. Selected by Lucille Clifton as part of the National Poetry Series, and now back in print, Most Way Home illuminates the African-American experience in language by turns gutsy and erudite, fresh and familiar -- but never dry or academic. This is great American poetry by a young poet to watch.