Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package.  Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women's lives and contains work by many of feminism's foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new preface that provides Barbara Smith the opportunity to look back on forty years of the struggle, as well as the influence the work in this book has had on generations of feminists. The preface from the previous Rutgers edition remains, as well as all of the original pieces, set in a fresh new package.  Contributors: Tania Abdulahad, Donna Allegra, Barbara A. Banks, Becky Birtha, Cenen, Cheryl Clarke, Michelle Cliff, Michelle T. Clinton, Willi (Willie) M. Coleman, Toi Derricotte, Alexis De Veaux, Jewelle L. Gomez, Akasha (Gloria) Hull, Patricia Spears Jones, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Raymina Y. Mays, Deidre McCalla, Chirlane McCray, Pat Parker, Linda C. Powell, Bernice Johnson Reagon, Spring Redd, Gwendolyn Rogers, Kate Rushin, Ann Allen Shockley, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Shirley O. Steele, Luisah Teish, Jameelah Waheed, Alice Walker, and Renita J. Weems.

Toi Derricotte's story is a hero's journey - a poet earning her way home, to her own commanding powers. "I": New and Selected Poems shows the reader both the closeness of the enemy and the poet's inherent courage, inventiveness, and joy. It is a record of one woman's response to the repressive and fracturing forces around the subjects of race, class, color, gender, and sexuality. Each poem is an act of victory as the author finds her way through repressive forces to speak with beauty and truth. This collection features more than thirty new poems as well as selections from five previous collections.

Toi Derricotte's fourth collection of poetry. "Tender" probes sexuality, spirituality, emotion, child abuse, mother hatred, and the physical and psychological ravages of violence. These poems are raw and upsetting in subject matter, yet extremely readable.

"Poems that stick with you like a song that won't stop repeating itself in your brain, poems whose cadences burrow into your bloodstream, orchestrating your breathing long before their sense attaches its hooks to your heart."
"--Washington Post" on "Captivity"

Founded by prizewinning poets Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996, Cave Canem has for the past ten years dedicated itself to the discovery and cultivation of new voices in African American poetry. Cave Canem began as a week-long summer workshop/retreat for poets and has now expanded to include regional workshops, poetry readings, a series of public interviews between major poets and emerging younger poets, and an annual first book prize. The roster of participants in Cave Canem workshops and events is impressive, including Lucille Clifton, Yusef Komunyakaa, Marilyn Nelson, Sonia Sanchez, Al Young, and many others. This collection of more than one hundred poems by Cave Canem participants and faculty includes: an eclectic gathering of forms, including sonnets, a bop (a new form created by a Cave Canem faculty member), blues, sestinas, prose poems, centos, and free verse.

"The Black Notebooks is the most profound document I have read on racism in America today. . . . [It] is not just one of the best books on race I have ever read but just simply one of the best books I have ever read." — Sapphire

The Black Notebooks is one of the most extraordinary and courageous accounts of race in this country, seen through the eyes of a light-skinned black woman and a respected American poet. It challenges all our preconceived notions of what it means to be black or white, and what it means to be human.

"A collection of personal journal entries accumulated over twenty years guides readers on an excursion through the mind of a woman who has been engaged in incessant warfare with the color of her skin . . . a candid and well-crafted exposé on racism." — Emerge

"[In] The Black Notebooks Derricotte, a light-skinned black woman, focuses intensely and wonderfully on blackness . . . brilliant, devastating. . . . Would I recommend it? Absolutely. To whom? Anyone interested in writing. In race. In human relationship." — Women's Review of Books

"The Black Notebooks is a sternly disciplined, unsentimental work." — New York Times Book Review

The Black Notebooks was the recipient of the Anisfield-Wolfe Award and the 1998 Caucus of the American Library Association Award and chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

• "The elegant combination of defiance and devotion that is The Black Notebooks speaks volumes about how perceptions of racial identity remain sharply divided." — Essence
• "What a hard book to have written and what an important book to read." — Grace Paley
• Excerpted in the Washington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Pitt Magazine

Toi Derricotte is the author of four collections of poetry. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh.

What are the forces that cause us to strike out and harm each other? Captivity explores the way in which the individual is held hostage by society; how the forces of racism, sexism, and classism frequently express themselves as violence within the family. The book also explores a deeper captivity, like the Jews in Egypt yearning for the Promised Land, the soul trapped in exile from God.