Offers a critical history of African American poetry from the transatlantic slave trade to present day hip-hop.

1. Introduction to a genre; 2. The origins of African American poetry; 3. Emancipation to modernism; 4. The twentieth-century Renaissances; 5. Contemporary African American poetry.

Lauri Ramey is Xiaoxiang Scholars Program Distinguished Professor at Hunan Normal University. Her previous publications include Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry (2010), The Heritage Series of Black Poetry, 1962-1975 (2008), Black British Writing (with R. Victoria Arana, 2009), and a two-volume anthology set (with Aldon Lynn Nielsen) Every Goodbye Ain't Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans (2006) and What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America (2015).