Ai's books & W. W. Norton & Company

The poet Ai, who died in 2010, began publishing in the 1970s, and in 1993, she gained a contract with W. W. Norton and Company, a move that would ensure that her poems reached an even wider audience. Her Norton books include: Greed (1993), Vice: New and Selected Poems (1999), Dread (2003), No Surrender (2010), and The Collected poems of Ai (2013).

Norton also published volumes by Rita Dove, Major Jackson, and A. Van Jordan. Speaking of poetry, in 2013, Norton published Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry edited by Charles Rowell. The company's most notable contribution to African American book history and production, though, is arguably the Norton Anthology of African American Literature, which is now in its third edition.

Related:
• A Notebook on Book History