With fierce candor and an unflinching eye, the highly praised author of Push journeys through the harsh realities of African American existence to find the "door to the possibility of now." The heroes that emerge from these forty-seven vigorous poems confront the agony of betrayal as they strive in their quest for self-transformation and redemption. From the city streets to the rich landscape of dreams, each of these poems holds out the "black wings of expectation" offering the chance to emerge from the pain of the past and arrive at "the day you have been waiting for/when you would finally begin to live." At turns alarming and inspiring, the raw lyrics and piercing wisdom of Black Wings & Blind Angels remind us of Sapphire's place as a unique and fearless voice.

Originally published: Gold Medal Books, New York, 1953.

For a full list of entries and contributors, sample entries, and more, visit the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women website. Featuring comprehensive global coverage of women's issues and concerns, from violence and sexuality to feminist theory, the Routledge International Encyclopedia of Women brings the field into the new millennium. In over 900 signed A-Z entries from US and Europe, Asia, the Americas, Oceania, and the Middle East, the women who pioneered the field from its inception collaborate with the new scholars who are shaping the future of women's studies to create the new standard work for anyone who needs information on women-related subjects.

A new 25th anniversary edition of the instant classic that inspired the major motion picture and Sundance Film Festival winner Precious: Based on the Novel 'PUSH' by Sapphire, whose power and ferocity influenced a generation of writers. Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as she learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it truly her own for the first time.

A new 25th anniversary edition of the instant classic that inspired the major motion picture and Sundance Film Festival winner Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, whose power and ferocity influenced a generation of writers. Precious Jones, an illiterate sixteen-year-old, has up until now been invisible to the father who rapes her and the mother who batters her and to the authorities who dismiss her as just one more of Harlem's casualties. But when Precious, pregnant with a second child by her father, meets a determined and radical teacher, we follow her on a journey of education and enlightenment as she learns not only how to write about her life, but how to make it truly her own for the first time.

The first collection focused on the writing of provocative author and performance artist Sapphire, including her groundbreaking novel PUSH that has since become the Academy-award-winning film Precious.

What would it mean to turn to ugliness rather than turn away from it? Indeed, the idea of ugly often becomes synonymous with non-white, non-male, and non-heterosexual physicality and experience. That same pejorative migrates to become a label for practices within underground culture. In Ugly Differences, Yetta Howard uses underground contexts to theorize queer difference by locating ugliness at the intersection of the physical, experiential, and textual. From that nexus, Howard contends that ugliness—as a mode of pejorative identification—is fundamental to the cultural formations of queer female sexuality. Slava Tsukerman's postpunk film Liquid Sky, Sapphire's poetry, Roberta Gregory's Bitchy Butch comix, New Queer Cinema such as High Art—these and other non-canonical works contribute to an audacious critique. Howard reveals how the things we see, read as, or experience as ugly productively account for non-dominant sexual identities and creative practices. Ugly Differences offers eye-opening ways to approach queerness and its myriad underground representations.

"My American Harp" presents 1,169 poems written 2010-2014 by Surazeus that explore what it means to be an American in the modern world of an interconnected global civilization.

Smoking Lovely's explorations of poetry and the neoliberal city at the intersection of community and commodity. In this radically revised new edition, Perdomo shifts the poem into mostly second person, thereby further accentuating its self-reflexive and complex exploration of self-and/as-other, and of the simultaneous othering, commodification, and spectacularization of Afro-diasporic bodies and cultural forms.

We have been bombarded by images of the U.S. Secretary of State as the Great Diplomat, walking onto the tarmac of a foreign country as if she were a rock star, an intellectual giant, and the embodiment of the American dream all rolled into one. Meanwhile, she has spoken out against affirmative action, lied to the 9/11 Commission, defended a disastrous war in Iraq, and been the mouthpiece for an administration at its most shameful moments. Who is she, and why does she hold such a special place in the national imagination? How does the Right use her to front racist and sexist policies in the U.S. and abroad? Why does the Left repress criticisms and thorough evaluations of one of the most influential people in Washington? Here is a compendium of think pieces, visual art, and imaginative works inspired by Dr. Condoleezza Rice. Contributors include Amiri Baraka, Kate Bornstein, Ann Butler, Sue Coe, Wanda Coleman, Coco Fusco, hattie gossett, Rachel Holmes, Gary Indiana, Jason Mecier, Jill Nelson, Faith Ringgold, Paul Robeson, Jr., Sapphire, Astra Taylor, Kara Walker, and Haifa Zangana.