The 61 poems in White Terror Black Trauma concentrate on some of the most traumatic events in Black history from colonial to contemporary times, from the arrival of enslaved Africans in 1619 to Black revolts, Civil War atrocities, incalculable lynchings, the Tulsa massacre, the brave sacrifices of Rosa Parks, the Freedom Riders, the heroes of school desegregation, the murders of Emmet Till, Dr. King, Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, George Floyd, Breanna Taylor, Eric Garner, and Tyre Nichols. And so many other Black tragedies.

Each poem here carries a brief head note identifying the person, place, time, or event that addresses the historical context of the poem. Some poems are written in a his/her recollection of the historical event. Above all, each poem highlights the topography of Black trauma, be that a Civil War fort, a lynching tree, a prison, a school, an island, a ghetto, a river, a national monument, a church, or city street. These resistance poems are chronicles, laments, petitions, heroic recollections about racial attacks on Black people in America.

Philip C. Kolin is the University Distinguished Professor in the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Southern Mississippi where he also edits The Southern Quarterly, a nationally renowned journal of the Arts in the South. He has taught at the University of Southern Mississippi for 41 years and has also traveled extensively in the Mississippi Delta where Emmett Till was slain. He is a native Chicagoan who graduated from Chicago State University, Mamie Till's alma mater, the University of Chicago, and received his Ph.D. in English from Northwestern University. Kolin has lived in various parts of Chicago from the near west side, where Emmett Till's grandmother Alma Sparkman lived in the 1940s, to the far south side to the northern suburbs of the city. Kolin has published more than 40 books, and over 200 scholarly articles, many on African American writers, themes, and influences. Regarded as an international authority on Tennessee Williams, Kolin has published books on Williams with Cambridge University Press, Greenwood Publishing, McFarland, and Peter Lang.