This informative edition explores the poetry of Langston Hughes through the lens of race. Coverage includes an examination of Hughes's life and influences; a look at key ideas related to race in Hughes's poetry, including the influence of African-American music, the use of poetry to address racial problems, and the politics of Hughes's anti-lynching poems; and contemporary perspectives on race, such as the decline of civil rights reform and the role of hip-hop in shaping black music.

Immediately celebrated as a tour de force upon its release, Langston Hughes's first published collection of poems still offers a powerful reflection of the Black experience. From "The Weary Blues" to "Dream Variation," Hughes writes clearly and colorfully, and his words remain prophetic.

An introduction to jazz music by one of our finest writers. Langston Hughes, celebrated poet and longtime jazz enthusiast, wrote The First Book of Jazz as a homage to the music that inspired him. The roll of African drums, the dancing quadrilles of old New Orleans, the work songs of the river ports, the field shanties of the cotton plantations, the spirituals, the blues, the off-beats of ragtime -- in a history as exciting as jazz rhythms, Hughes describes how each of these played a part in the extraordinary history of jazz.

Provides an examination of the use of enslavement and emancipation in classic literary works.

This informative edition explores the poetry of Langston Hughes through the lens of race. Coverage includes an examination of Hughes's life and influences; a look at key ideas related to race in Hughes's poetry, including the influence of African-American music, the use of poetry to address racial problems, and the politics of Hughes's anti-lynching poems; and contemporary perspectives on race, such as the decline of civil rights reform and the role of hip-hop in shaping black music.

Langston Hughes electrified readers and launched a renaissance in Black writing in America—the poems in this collection were chosen by Hughes himself shortly before his death and represent stunning work from his entire career. The poems Hughes wrote celebrated the experience of invisible men and women: of slaves who "rushed the boots of Washington"; of musicians on Lenox Avenue; of the poor and the lovesick; of losers in "the raffle of night." They conveyed that experience in a voice that blended the spoken with the sung, that turned poetic lines into the phrases of jazz and blues, and that ripped through the curtain separating high from popular culture. They spanned the range from the lyric to the polemic, ringing out "wonder and pain and terror—and the marrow of the bone of life." The collection includes "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," "The Weary Blues," "Still Here," "Song for a Dark Girl," "Montage of a Dream Deferred," and "Refugee in America." It gives us a poet of extraordinary range, directness, and stylistic virtuosity.

Here, for the first time, is a complete collection of Langston Hughes's poetry - 860 poems that sound the heartbeat of black life in America during five turbulent decades, from the 1920s through the 1960s.

“Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air.” —NPR In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation “as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself.” Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet’s search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America. The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can’t really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

A collection of poems that explore the issues surrounding race relations in American society, told from the experience of Black, Native American, Asian, Arabic, Hispanic, and white cultures.