From the end of the 1950s through the middle of the 1960s, Amiri Baraka (b. 1934) and Edward Dorn (1929–99), two self-consciously avant-garde poets, fostered an intense friendship primarily through correspondence. The early 1960s found both poets just beginning to publish and becoming public figures. Bonding around their commitment to new and radical forms of poetry and culture, Dorn and Baraka created an interracial friendship at precisely the moment when the Civil Rights Movement was becoming a powerful force in national politics. The major premise of the Dorn-Jones friendship as developed through their letters was artistic, but the range of subjects in the correspondence shows an incredible intersection between the personal and the public, providing a schematic map of what was so vital in postwar American culture to those living through it. Their letters offer a vivid picture of American lives connecting around poetry during a tumultuous time of change and immense creativity. Reading through these correspondences allows access into personal biographies, and through these biographies, profound moments in American cultural history open themselves to us in a way not easily found in official channels of historical narrative and memory.

The letters of Amiri Baraka and Edward Dorn offer a vivid picture of American lives connecting around poetry during a tumultuous time of change and immense creativity.

Dorn's high-spirited, crazy-quilt, complex anti-epic is a masterful critique of late twentieth-century capitalism and is one of the great comic poems of American literature. Dorn is one of the few political poets in America; this fantasy about a demigod cowboy, a saloon madam, and a talking horse named Claude Levi-Strauss, who travel the Southwest in search of Howard Hughes, as become a minor classic.

Collects the commentary of the later years and last days of one of America's most powerful and unique poets

Published under the author's earlier name: LeRoi Jones.

Set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the war in Iraq, and 9/11, A Little History explores the deep politics of memory and imagination while proposing a new paradigm for American Studies. With a preface by editor Fred Dewey, Alcalay's book places the work of major figures like Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Olson, Edward Dorn, Diane di Prima, and Amiri Baraka, in the realm of resistance and global decolonization to assert the power of poetry as a unique form of knowledge.

Collects the poetry from the last decade of American Book Awards that best reflects the multicultural interests and accomplishments in American literature

" A path-breaking photo narrative of Dorn and African-American photographer Leroy Lucas's mid-1960s travels through Shoshoni Indian country (Nevada, Idaho, Wyoming, and Utah) to paint a stark tableau of modern Native life"--

The papers contain items relating to the life and work of the American poet Edward Dorn, primarily from the late 1980s to his death in 1999. Some correspondence, notebooks, and files date from earlier periods of his life. The collection is organized into eight series. Series 1 includes Dorn's general correspondence of ca. 1992-1999, mostly incoming, with about 300 different individuals; 154 pieces of correspondence with Tom Clark, beginning in 1980; Dorn's letters to Jennifer Dunbar, his wife-to-be, from 1967 and 1968; photocopies of correspondence with LeRoi Jones (later known as Amiri Baraka); a digital file of certain of Dorn's letters; correspondence relating to publishers and poetry readings; and condolences addressed to Jennifer upon his death. It also includes 28 letters from Dorn to Gordon Taylor that were given to Jennifer Dorn after Dorn's death. Series 2 includes Dorn's manuscripts, mostly in the form of printouts and proofs for works such as Abhorrences, Chemo Sábe, Gunslinger, Hi Plane, and Langue d'Oc, among others. An extensive collection of Dorn's notebooks, address books, and calendars is also in Series 2. Series 3 contains files relating to Dorn's education and career at Black Mountain College and at the University of Colorado, including a two-page letter from Robert Creeley on behalf of Dorn's graduation from Black Mountain College and a certificate signed by Charles Olson. Series 4 holds the archives of the literary magazine Rolling Stock. Miscellaneous items such as broadsides by Dorn appear in Series 5, while Series 6 contains manuscripts by other individuals about Dorn and other subjects. Series 7 holds audio recordings that include 18 cassettes by Stan Brakhage, an interview with Amiri Baraka, and readings by Charles Olson among others. Series 8 includes the original folders that housed the collection; many are labeled in Dorn's hand.