For Black writers, what is tradition? What does it mean to them that Western humanism has excluded Black culture? Seven noted Black writers and critics take up these and other questions in this collection of original essays, attempting to redefine humanism from a Black perspective, to free it from ethnocentrism, and to enlarge its cultural base. Contributors: Richard K. Barksdale, Alice Childress, Chester J. Fontenot, Michael S. Harper, Trudier Harris, George E. Kent, R. Baxter Miller

"Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep" is a rich collection of the work of post-World War II African-American poets. It brings together the voices of the most important African-American poets of our time, beginning with the highly influential Robert Hayden and Gwendolyn Brooks, and covers an astonishing range of styles and techniques.

This extraordinary body of poetry is the flowering of an artistic tradition established earlier in this century by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. The newer work comprises many different visions, ranging from the chiseled and layered modernism of Jay Wright to the plainspoken ferocity of Sonia Sanchez, from the dazzling witticisms of Ishmael Reed to the plangent lyricism of Rita Dove.

Edited by the distinguished poet Michael Harper and his star student and colleague Anthony Walton, this notable collection of work will be the standard anthology in the field for years to come.

For decades, Michael S. Harper has written poetry that speaks with many voices. His work teems with poetry configured as awe, poetry as courtship, and poetry as elegy and homage. Infused with tales and riddles, sass and satire and surprise, Harper's poetry takes the form of psalms, jazz experiments, soft serenades, and radical provocations.

In "Use Trouble," his first major collection since "Songlines in Michaeltree," Harper renews poetry as the art of taking nothing for granted. In three groups--"The Fret Cycle," "Use Trouble," and "I Do Believe in People"--he draws on his seemingly inexhaustible resources to paint, sing, sympathize, and sorrow. Here are his tributes to his father and family, his irrepressible playfulness, and his lifelong romance between poetry and music.

"Harper's is a poetry of classically unadorned statement, a direct, unflinching record of a man alive in his time. When he is at his best, in both his public and his private voice, he creates a language humming with emotion and ennobled by a deeply felt human dignity." -- Virginia Quarterly Review ". . . one of the finest poets of our time." -- San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle Stephen Henderson Award, African American Literature and Culture Society (AALCS), 2013. Author is recipient of the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement, Poetry Society of America, 2008.