It is 1878, and Jeremiah and Matilda Dunniff are broke. After the linen industry crumbles, the young Irish couple realizes they have no way to make money. With an eviction notice hanging over their heads, they decide to immigrate to America with hopes of creating a better life. They are unaware that, across the Atlantic, more hardship awaits. When the Dunniff family arrives in New York City, they are forced to move into the tenements, where Jeremiah soon recognizes that the streets in America are not paved with gold. As he becomes angry and turns to the bottle for comfort, Matilda discovers she is pregnant with another child, whom she later names Rose. Unfortunately, Jeremiah is on a path of self-destruction; after Rose enters sixth grade, he dies from alcoholism. Rose, forced to grow up much sooner than normal, falls in love with the theater and begins acting. As Rose begins her own journey through life, it soon becomes evident that each generation born will turn to the previous one for guidance-an act that strengthens the Dunniff family bond forever. Generations of Love is a compelling tale that follows three generations through love, loss, pain, sorrow, and joy as each family attempts to survive all of life's challenges.

An award-winning author presents a portrait of Black America in the nineteenth century Over the course of two decades, award-winning poet Patricia Smith has amassed a collection of rare nineteenth-century photographs of Black men, women, and children who, in these pages, regard us from the staggering distance of time. Unshuttered is a vessel for the voices of their incendiary and critical era. Smith’s searing stanzas and revelatory language imbue the subjects of the photos with dynamism and revived urgency while she explores how her own past of triumphs and losses is linked inextricably to their long-ago lives: We ache for fiction etched in black and white. Our eyes never touch. These tragic grays and bustles, mourners’ hats plopped high upon our tamed but tangled crowns, strain to disguise what yearning does with us. The poet’s unrivaled dexterity with dramatic monologue and poetic form reanimates these countenances, staring back from such yesterdays, and the stories they may have told. This is one of American literature’s finest wordsmiths doing what she does best—unreeling history to find its fierce and formidable lyric.

New in paperback! Winner of the 1996 G.K. Hall Award and Multicultural Review's 1995 Carey McWilliams Award. Paperback edition available 2002. 'Designed to be used by librarians and teachers exploring works written by and for African Americans...a wonderful professional source to help in choosing literature for school libraries...Recommended.'-THE BOOK REPORT 'This collection will fill an important need for school and public libraries seeking a more scholarly dialogue on African-American literature for young adults.'-VOYA

The history of women's rights has usually been defined in terms of the fight for suffrage. Yet the agenda of the women's rights movement in the mid-nineteenth through early twentieth centuries embraced a broader spectrum of goals, goals that were reflected in the women's rights periodicals of the era. One of the goals--securing women's rights to higher education--has remained virtually unexamined and, consequently, all but unknown. In filling that gap, Butcher links two little-known aspects of the women's rights movement: its press and its struggle to secure for women the advantages of higher education. Eleven of the best-known papers, written by women, for women, are analyzed here in chapters covering the women's rights press, the purpose of women's education, coeducation, women as teachers, and the professional and graduate education of women. In offering this analysis, and in exploring the fight for higher education, Butcher broadens our understanding of the history and the legacy of the women's rights movement.

Incendiary Art confronts the tyranny against the black male body and the tenacious grief of the mothers of murdered African American men. Dynamic sequences, including a compelling chronicle of the devastating murder of Emmett Till, serve as a backdrop for present-day racial calamities and calls for resistance. With impassioned eloquence and a sharpened focus on incidents of national mayhem and mourning, Patricia Smith reinvents the role of witness with an incendiary fusion of forms, including prose poems, ghazals, sestinas, and sonnets. This phenomenal, visionary book addresses what is frightening, and what is revelatory, about history now. Winner of the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and 2018 NAACP Image Award, Incendiary Art was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and 2018 Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

In minute-by-minute detail, Patricia Smith tracks Hurricane Katrina as it transforms into a full-blown mistress of destruction. From August 23, 2005, the day Tropical Depression Twelve developed, through August 28 when it became a Category Five storm with its "scarlet glare fixed on the trembling crescent," to the heartbreaking aftermath, these poems evoke the horror that unfolded in New Orleans as America watched it on television.

Assuming the voices of flailing politicians, the dying, their survivors, and the voice of the hurricane itself, Smith follows the woefully inadequate relief effort and stands witness to families held captive on rooftops and in the Superdome. She gives voice to the thirty-four nursing home residents who drowned in St. Bernard Parish and recalls the day after their deaths when George W. Bush accompanied country singer Mark Willis on guitar:

"The cowboy grins through the terrible din, "
***
"And in the Ninth, a choking woman wails"
Look like this country done left us for dead.

An unforgettable reminder that poetry can still be "news that stays news," "Blood Dazzler "is a necessary step toward national healing.

Patricia Smith is the author of four previous collections of poetry, including "Teahouse of the Almighty," winner of the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and the Paterson Poetry Prize. A record-setting, national poetry slam champion, she was featured in the film "Slamnation," on the HBO series "Def Poetry Jam," and is a frequent contributor to "Harriet," the Poetry Foundation's blog. Visit her website at www.wordwoman.ws.

The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award-winner Terrance Hayes. An array of writers-including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate-have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets. This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks's daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks's legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.

"The Story of Lynn" is a mother's story of her remarkable daughter, who was killed in a tragic accident. The memories of her daughter's life and how she has dealt with the aftermath will inspire you.

A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by Edward Sanders.

"What power. Smith's poetry is all "poetry." And visceral. Her poems get under the skin of their subjects. Their passion and empathy, their real worldliness, are blockbuster."--Marvin Bell

"I was weeping for the beauty of poetry when I reached the end of the final poem."--Edward Sanders, National Poetry Series judge

From Lollapalooza to Carnegie Hall, Patricia Smith has taken the stage as this nation's premier performance poet. Featured in the film "Slamnation" and on the HBO series "Def Poetry Jam, " Smith is back with her first book in over a decade--a National Poetry Series winner weaving passionate, bluesy narratives into an empowering, finely tuned cele-bration of poetry's liberating power.

Selected by Patricia Smith as winner of the 2018 A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Matt Morton's debut poetry collection Improvisation Without Accompaniment embraces uncertainty with a spirit of joyous playfulness. These lyric poems follow the rhythms of life for a young man growing up in a small Texas town. As the speaker wrestles with ruptures within the nuclear family and the loss of his religious beliefs, he journeys toward a deeper self-awareness and discovers a fuller palette of experiences. Over the course of this collection, the changing seasons of small-town Texas life give way to surprise encounters in distant cities. The speaker's awareness of mortality grows even as he improvises an affirming response to life's toughest questions. Poignant, searching, and earnestly philosophical, Improvisation Without Accompaniment reaches for meaning within life's joys and griefs.