Showcases brilliant and experimental work in African American poetry. Just prior to the Second World War, and even more explosively in the 1950s and 1960s, a far-reaching revolution in aesthetics and prosody by black poets ensued, some working independently and others in organized groups. Little of this new work was reflected in the anthologies and syllabi of college English courses of the period. Even during the 1970s, when African American literature began to receive substantial critical attention, the work of many experimental black poets continued to be neglected. Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone presents the groundbreaking work of many of these poets who carried on the innovative legacies of Melvin Tolson, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Robert Hayden. Whereas poetry by such key figures such as Amiri Baraka, Tolson, Jayne Cortez, Clarence Major, and June Jordan is represented, this anthology also elevates into view the work of less studied poets such as Russell Atkins, Jodi Braxton, David Henderson, Bob Kaufman, Stephen Jonas, and Elouise Loftin. Many of the poems collected in the volume are currently unavailable and some will appear in print here for the first time. Coeditors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey provide a critical introduction that situates the poems historically and highlights the ways such poetry has been obscured from view by recent critical and academic practices. The result is a record of experimentation, instigation, and innovation that links contemporary African American poetry to its black modernist roots and extends the terms of modern poetics into the future.

"They said he was crazy, but he was merely mad, angry at the racist insanity he saw around him in the South of the '60s. They arrested him for fire-bombing a segregated toilet and put him away in a mental hospital, aptly named 'Limbo.' Released ten years later, he goes home to the housing projects of South Central Los Angeles, where he witnesses an entirely different kind of insanity--a black-on-black cruelty even more destructive than what he had gone south to protest."--Publisher's note on back cover

Poetry and photography are universal languages spoken from the heart. When they converse together, the can flow like song. In this book, Heartstrings, you will meet siblings, a sister and brother who have joined forces to share their visions of life through their use of the lens and the pen. Although they live two thousand miles apart, they are able to combine their artistry in a way that brings their images and words together. Now this union has made it possible for you to make the journey as well, with beautiful and sometimes painful views into the world we live.

For ten days in March 1971, the Rolling Stones traveled by train and bus to play two shows a night in many of the small theaters and town halls where their careers began. No backstage passes. No security. No sound checks or rehearsals. And only one journalist allowed. That journalist now delivers a full-length account of this landmark event, which marked the end of the first chapter of the Stones' extraordinary career. Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye is also the story of two artists on the precipice of mega stardom, power, and destruction. For Mick and Keith, and all those who traveled with them, the farewell tour of England was the end of the innocence. Based on Robert Greenfield's first-hand account and new interviews with many of the key players, this is a vibrant, thrilling look at the way it once was for the Rolling Stones and their fans—and the way it would never be again.

Owned by his father, Isaac Harold Anderson (1835–1906) was born a slave but went on to become a wealthy businessman, grocer, politician, publisher, and religious leader in the African American community in the state of Georgia. Elected to the state senate, Anderson replaced his white father there, and later shepherded his people as a founding member and leader of the Colored Methodist Episcopal church. He helped support the establishment of Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, where he subsequently served as vice president. Anderson was instrumental in helping freed people leave Georgia for the security of progressive safe havens with significantly large Black communities in northern Mississippi and Arkansas. Eventually under threat to his life, Anderson made his own exodus to Arkansas, and then later still, to Holly Springs, Mississippi, where a vibrant Black community thrived. Much of Anderson’s unique story has been lost to history—until now. In The Recovered Life of Isaac Anderson, author Alicia K. Jackson presents a biography of Anderson and in it a microhistory of Black religious life and politics after emancipation. A work of recovery, the volume captures the life of a shepherd to his journeying people, and of a college pioneer, a CME minister, a politician, and a former slave. Gathering together threads from salvaged details of his life, Jackson sheds light on the varied perspectives and strategies adopted by Black leaders dealing with a society that was antithetical to them and to their success.

At the age of forty-eight, I thought my dreams were over. Depressed, physically ill and emotionally bruised, I had all but given up. I had no hope and felt destined to a life of misery and gloom. Then something happened, I began to hear a voice speak to me. Was I crazy? God doesn't speak to "ordinary" people, does he? Well, he was speaking to me. At first I didn't know what to think, what to do, but then He told me to look back over my life and tell Him what I saw. What I saw was not what I expected; what I saw was evidence of God's goodness throughout my life. That's when I began to thank and praise Him. From that day my life changed drastically, on every level, in every aspect. I began to look at life in a new way, a more positive way. The more positive I began to think, the more positive things started to occur in my life. Those conversations with God led to the writing of this book.

Written within a cloistered environment to protect sources that have yet to be identified, TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE is a chilling portrait of two beautiful, successful women whose murders were made to look like suicides. Jenn Corbin appeared to have it all: two little boys, a posh home in the suburbs of Atlanta, and a husband - Dr Bart Corbin, a successful dentist - who was handsome and brilliant. Then, in December 2004, Jenn was found dead with a bullet in her head, apparently by suicide. Only later would detectives learn that another woman in Dr Corbin's past had been found years earlier with nearly the exact same wound to the head, also ruled a suicide. In TOO LATE TO SAY GOODBYE, Ann Rule - working in cooperation with victims' families, police investigators, and sources from Georgia to Australia - unravels the now-sensational deaths. What emerges is an incredible tale of jealous rage; of stunning evidence that runs from the steamy to the macabre; and of a fateful, mind-boggling coincidence that appears to have motivated the killings. The definitive unravelling of one of the strangest murder investigations of our time, this is the greatest achievement of a truly great writing career.

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day. The elder poets in this collection, such as Nathaniel Mackey, C. S. Giscombe, Will Alexander, and Ron Allen, came of age during and were powerfully influenced by the Black Arts Movement, and What I Say grounds the collection in its black modernist roots. In tracing the fascinating and unexpected paths of experimentation these poets explored, however, Nielsen and Ramey reveal the tight delineations of African American poetry that omitted noncanonical forms. This invigorating panoply of work, when restored, brings into focus the creatively elastic frontiers and multifaceted expressions of contemporary black poetry. Several of the poets discussed in What I Say forged relationships with members of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry movement and participated in the broader community of innovative poetry that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s and continues to exert a powerful influence today. Each volume can stand on its own, and reading them in tandem will provide a clear vision of how innovative African American poetries have evolved across the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. What I Say is infinitely teachable, compelling, and rewarding. It will appeal to a broad readership of poets, poetics teachers, poetics scholars, students of African American literature in nonnarrative forms, Afro-futurism, and what lies between the modern and the contemporary in global and localized writing practices.