African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song is a literary landmark: the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song is the centerpiece of Lift Every Voice : Why African American Poetry Matters, a national public humanities initiative made possible with support from The National Endowment for the Humanities, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Emerson Collective. , featuring video readings and commentaries—over fifty in all—by poets Kevin Young and Elizabeth Alexander, actors Mahershala Ali and Phylicia Rashad, and others—plus a timeline of African American poetry, archival audio and video, photos and biographies of the poets, a reading group guide with brief essays by leading poets and scholars, and more.
Kevin Young is the Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture and poetry editor of The New Yorker. He has previously served as curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library at Emory University and director the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at the New York Public Library. Young is the author of many books, including Brown, Bunk, Blue Laws, and Jelly Roll. Among the anthologies he has edited are Blues Poems, Jazz Poems, The Art of Losing: Poems of Grief & Healing, and, for Library of America, John Berryman: Selected Poems.
