Books in Brief: Spirit Deep: Recovering the Sacred in Black Women's Travel by Tisha Brooks

About the Book

Publication: 2023
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
A compelling exploration of how nineteenth-century Black women writers used spirituality and travel to claim freedom, movement, and power.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
Spirit Deep began with my love of spiritual autobiography but was deeply informed by my fascination with Black women's travel. I was amazed at the mobility of Black women spiritual autobiographers and the extent of their travels especially during a time when most African American women were either enslaved or living in contexts that made such travel unlikely or even impossible. I was looking for a book that took seriously Black women's spirituality and travel but couldn't find that book, so I wrote it. 

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
I am most surprised by the evolution of the book to include such a variety of genres (biblical narrative, spiritual autobiography, travel narrative, film) that extend beyond a single historical period. Because of the cover of the book, readers may be surprised that Spirit Deep isn't just about nineteenth century Black women writers, and I hope they learn the value of reading across time periods and discover how the stories we tell about the past informs our present.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
The hardest decision I made was scrapping an entire chapter and giving myself permission to begin again. While I struggled with writer’s block throughout the first draft of Chapter four, the second version that I wrote practically wrote itself because I invited my whole self into the writing process—not just my college-educated mind but also the deep knowing and wisdom that I inherited from generations of Black women before me. Surrendering the first draft was hard but once I released it, writing became easier.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
Trust what I know and how I know it. This practice enabled me to access a true and fuller voice in my writing and, when it came time to engage with external critical voices and readers (reviewers and editors), it was easier to ensure my voice and deep (interior) knowing remained in conversation with those readers rather than eclipsed by their feedback. This interior grounding ensured that the final decisions about the book were my own and not just externally driven. 

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?

Saidyia Hartman’s Lose Your Mother (2007)
Toni Morrison, “Site of Memory” and “On Beloved” from The Sources of Self-Regard (2019)
Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983)
Deborah McDowell’s Recovering the Black Female Body (2001)
P. Gabrielle Foreman’s Activist Sentiments (2009)

The common thread across all these texts, which I found myself returning to often, is recovery. As a nineteenth-century scholar of African American literature this isn’t surprising. Reading across these critical texts enabled me to develop an analysis of recovery practices that expands beyond the recovery of Black women’s bodies and bodies of written work to consider the recovery of their interior (spiritual) lives as well. More, it informed my understanding of Black women writers’ recovery work as not only secular and imaginative (creative) practice, but also as spiritual (sacred) practice.

Books in Brief: Striking Features: Psychoanalysis and Racial Passing Narratives by Donavan Ramon

About the Book
Publication: 2024
Publisher: Mercer University Press

A provocative exploration of racial passing narratives through psychoanalysis, revealing the trauma, desires, and psychological consequences of crossing the color line.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book? 

As an undergraduate, I read a few passing narratives back to back: James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Nella Larsen’s Passing, and Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun, among many others. I started noticing some trends across these narratives, which really crystallized for me as a graduate student at Rutgers when I enrolled in Michelle Stephens’ Race and Psychoanalysis graduate seminar. This class allowed me to put together my dual interests in passing and psychoanalysis.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process? The scholarly reticence to put race and psychoanalysis in dialogue. I now understand why, but due to this scholarly gap, I had a hard time finding sources when situating my work. This meant the scholarship at the intersection of racial passing and psychoanalysis was essentially nonexistent until my book was published.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book? Having to cut out a large section on folks passing as Black. I wrote a little bit about the Rachel Dolezals of the world in my conclusion, but that section was longer in the initial draft. Ultimately, I opted to keep my focus on passing as white, since it was/is far more prevalent.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects? Concision. Due to modern reading practices, it’s best to be more concise. My chapters are far too long, so in my future projects I will have shorter chapters and get to the point sooner instead of waiting for the big payoff toward the end.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?
Yes, Freud Upside Down: African American Literature and Psychoanalytic Culture by Badia Ahad and Claudia Tate’s Psychoanalysis and Black Novels. Though this latter work is older, it is a turning point in the scholarship at the intersection of race and psychoanalysis.

Books in Brief: Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive by Ryan Sharp

About the Book
Publication: 2024
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

A compelling exploration of how contemporary Black poets use persona and archival imagination to recover, reconstruct, and reimagine Black histories.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
There were many moments of inspiration and epiphany. That said, the genesis of this project was the critical thesis I was required to write while pursuing my MFA in Writing at Pacific University. It was then, immersed in my reading list while trying to figure out what exactly I might have to say, that I started to pick up on the thread of Black US historical persona poetry in the 2000s and 2010s.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
Being new to the process of writing a book, I was overwhelmed by the impossibility of offering a complete analysis. The more I learned, the closer I came to understanding not only what I didn’t know but also how much needed to be done if I were to fully explore every aspect of my topic—the poetry, the racial and cultural matters, the literary history, the applicable theory, etc. Thus, I had to learn how to narrow my scope and come to terms with what could be realistically accomplished.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
The book was originally organized around terminology from Toni Morrison’s “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” As the project developed, the terminology began to no longer suit my argument. Yet, it was difficult to pivot away from it as I was emotionally tied to the terminology and loved having Morrison central in my analysis. Further, the change meant I needed to do a lot of work to revise the book’s framework and edit out the refences to the lecture that were no longer applicable.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
As simple as it sounds, a major lesson that I learned and re-learned throughout the process is to ground my argument through clearly asserting my points early. I was often writing myself into discoveries, so I had to be very intentional and methodical about going back to rework the beginnings of sections and adjust topic sentences. This has gone more smoothly in subsequent projects.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?
There are several excellent books exploring contemporary Black US poetry and poetics that were published around the same time as Another Throat that I hope the book is in conversation with and, together, are indicative of growing interest in recent Black US poetry, including Annette Debo’s The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry (2024) and Laura Vrana’s Pitfalls of Prestige: Black Women and Literary Recognition (2024). There are also many books that I cited, and many that I did not have an occasion to cite, in the book that I admire and hope to be conversing with, such as Elizabeth Alexander’s The Black Interior (2004), Tony Bolden’s Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture (2003), Kevin Quashie’s The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture (2012) and Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being (2021), Derik Smith’s Robert Hayden in Verse: New Histories of African American Poetry and the Black Arts Era (2018), and much of Emily Ruth Rutter’s work (though here specifically I would note Black Celebrity: Contemporary Representations of Postbellum Athletes and Artists (2018). Further, Rambsy’s work—in particular Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (2020), his essays, and the Cultural Front blog—continue to be instrumental and inspirational to my research and development.

Books in Brief: The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture by Courtney Thorsson

About the Book
Publication: 2023
Publisher: Columbia University Press

A revealing account of how a groundbreaking network of Black women writers reshaped American literature through advocacy and community building.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?
Two mentors put me on the path to my book: Farah Griffin, who told me about the photo "The Sisterhood, 1977" when I was in grad school and Cheryl Wall, who told me a few years later that she had seen what she thought were minutes for meeting of that group. The photo and the minutes told me there was an important story there and it was one I had to figure out.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?
Every former Sisterhood member whom I interviewed (whether on or off the record) was generous with her time and intellect. Some of them stayed in touch, offered encouragement along the way, and supported my book once it was out. Maybe it's less that I was surprised by these women's generosity, but more that I remain just bowled over by it and wildly grateful for it.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?
Over years of writing and revision, some readers kept pushing for me to include more about the private lives of Sisterhood members. Sticking to my commitment to write about their work as intellectuals and writers—which is what the group was about!—was often difficult.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?
It takes time, financial support, and the help of network of librarians, archivists, scholars, and writers to research and write literary and cultural history. With all that support, I can do my best work: careful, serious, slow research writing, and revision that hopefully results in a book that will be useful for years to come.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?
Alexis De Veaux's Warrior Poet: A Biography of Audre Lorde is the gold standard for writing beautiful literary history that uses close reading of poetry to advance a narrative. Shanna Benjamin's Half in Shadow: The Life of Nellie Y. McKay and Howard Rambsy's The Black Arts Enterprise and the Production of African American Poetry , along with his blog posts and journal articles, taught me how to think and write about the material conditions of African American literature. I wrote The Sisterhood in conversation with Erica Edwards's The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire ; I hope that influence shows on every page. Mary Helen Washington's books all remind me how and why we continue studying and teaching Black women's writing.

Books in Brief: Pitfalls of Prestige by Laura Elizabeth Vrana

About the Book
Publication: 2024

Publisher: The Ohio State University Press

A critical examination of how literary institutions elevate, constrain, and shape the recognition of Black women poets.

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?

So many moments and conversations! I can identify in retrospect that seeing my professor Elizabeth Alexander (yes, I was that lucky as an undergraduate) on the stage as Obama’s inaugural poet in January 2009, while I was in her course in African American poetry, began to spark something nascent. More concretely, it was noticing early in graduate school how common the “only one at a time” phenomenon or paradigm seemed, with women like Rita Dove, then Natasha Trethewey, being consecrated with the same accolades in parallel and in similar orders; I had long loved the poetry itself, but that sparked me to link it up to the ecosystem it inhabits and circumstances of its production.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?

This will now surprise no one, because Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young published that great, methodologically thorough piece “On Poets and Prizes” in ASAP/Review in November 2020 (and have also since with Claire Grossman published “The Index of Major Literary Prizes in the US” data). But when I was first revising the dissertation massively to become a book, none of that was available yet, and so I was so surprised by how insular, cyclical, and closed the poetry prize ecosystem viscerally felt when looking anecdotally through the lens of contemporary Black women’s poetry. That led me to research the whole system of judging, how prizes tend to beget more prizes, etc. and how this impacts Black women (and their data later gave more weight to my own observations about the small sub-field).

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?

Which collections and poets to focus on! I made the unorthodox decision to write extensively about 15 collections/poets, but even culling to that was extremely difficult: I wanted to pseudo represent the breadth of contemporary Black women’s poetry in styles and subject matter but also zoom in enough to give useful case studies for different subtopics. Some advised me that I would have to cut that number, some told me to do less close reading but increase that number, but I kept coming back to (and am glad I stuck with) these 15—an imperfect selection, but hopefully useful discussions.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?

To trust my gut/instincts and therefore not let some types of negative feedback that don’t truly feel useful get into my head—there will always be people telling us to write different books than the ones we are writing, other projects that would also be great but just aren’t our work!—but also to listen to suggestions, especially from the editor (if you’re blessed with a good one, like I was).

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?

This one is difficult because I hesitate to place my own work arrogantly in the lofty company or even the same sentence as certain books that are certainly important to me, that inspired mine, and that are about overlapping subjects! But I suppose I’d say Evie Shockley’s Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry, Meta DuEwa Jones’s The Muse Is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word, and much of my mentor Aldon Lynn Nielsen’s work. Oh, and now in terms of books released after (or that I hadn’t yet read while working on it!), Ryan Sharp’s Another Throat: Twenty-First-Century Black US Persona Poetry and the Archive and Annette Debo’s The Necessary Past: Revising History in Contemporary African American Poetry come to mind.

Books in Brief: The Geographies of African American Short Fiction by Kenton Rambsy

About the Book

Publication: 2022

Publisher: University Press of Mississippi

A long-overdue history of short stories, place, and the significance of setting on racial representation

This post is part of the Books in Brief series, which features concise conversations with scholars about their books in African American literary studies.

1. What inspired you to pursue the lines of research and writing that resulted in this book?

I originally started working with novels and collecting data, but novels are long and time consuming. Also, as a genre, they get a lot of scholarly attention already. I turned to short stories because nearly every major Black novelist has written them, which allowed me to cover more ground, collect more data, and pay attention to a genre that circulates heavily but is not studied as much. I also wanted to think about the constructedness of literary history and use anthologies to build a systematic, evidence-based archive for examining which writers and stories circulate most often.

2. What surprised you most during your research or writing process?

I was surprised by the way signature stories take hold over time. A writer might have several stories that appear in anthologies, but the data allowed me to see when a consensus began to form around particular stories and how those selections came to represent a writer.

3. What was the hardest decision you had to make while writing this book?

The hardest decision was figuring out how to assemble the dataset because there are so many anthologies, and Black literary materials can sometimes be elusive and difficult to track down. I wanted the dataset to be as representative as possible, but I also knew I could not collect everything, so I had to think carefully about when to stop and be transparent about what I collected and why I included certain anthologies.

4. What's one lesson you learned while producing this book that you'll carry into future projects?

The project made me realize how scarce Black data is, especially Black literary data, and how important it is to curate datasets in machine-readable formats for analysis. It also taught me that collecting data is itself an involved form of scholarly labor: I spent a long time building the dataset before I could analyze it, and if that data had already existed, I could have spent much more time on interpretation.

5. If any come to mind, are there books in African American literary studies that you see your work in conversation with?

Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason-Dixon Line influenced how I thought about geography and the importance of the South in African American literature. The Norton Anthology of African American Literature was also important to me because, as a student, it helped shape how I understood the field, literary cohorts, and the writers who came to represent different periods of Black literary history.

A Companion Checklist to My Post on C. Liegh McInnis's Poem on Bob Ross

These days, I tend to write shorter blog posts, but since this one, "From Phillis Wheatley and Scipio Moorhead to C. Liegh McInnis and Bob Ross" got lengthier than I expected, I'm providing a checklist of poets and artists mentioned in the context of the McInnis's poem on Bob Ross.

Poets

• C. Liegh McInnis 

• William J. Harris 

• Phillis Wheatley 

• Paul Laurence Dunbar 

• Countee Cullen 

• Langston Hughes 

• Robert Hayden 

• Gwendolyn Brooks 

• Elizabeth Alexander 

• Rita Dove 

• Nikky Finney 

• Tyehimba Jess 

• Reginald Harris 

• Rachel Eliza Griffiths 

• Yusef Komunyakaa 

• celeste doaks 

• Kevin Youg 

• Adrian Matejka 

• Rickey Laurentiis

Artist

• Jean-Michel Basquiat

• Bob Ross
• Scipio Moorhead
• Aaron Douglas
• Claude Monet
• Edward Christmas
• Jacob Lawrence
• Romare Bearden
• James Van Der Zee
• Frida Khalo
• David Bailly
• Georgia O'Keeffe

Related:

• Black Poets and Artwork

From Phillis Wheatley and Scipio Moorhead to C. Liegh McInnis and Bob Ross

Painter, art instructor Bob Ross

Every time I try to take a break from poetry, someone pulls me back in. This time, it was none other than C. Liegh McInnis, who has a habit of getting my attention. He'll send an email about this or that; he'll publish an article on a topic; or he'll make a comment during a podcast or interview, and then I'm distracted,. This time, he got me with a poem.

For years, I've observed and sometimes commented on poets writing visual art. I've noted Black poets and Basquiat, William J. Harris and those cardplayer paintings, and then a whole short checklist of African American poets on artworks & artists. 

I had seen a lot and then here comes McInnis writing about Bob Ross. What? 

Ross was a white painter and art instructor, most well-known for his television show The Joy of Painting. Speaking in a calming voice, he offered instructions on how to paint natural landscapes using oil painting. The show aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS. 

[Related: A Companion Checklist to My Post on C. Liegh McInnis's Poem on Bob Ross]

I recall seeing the show as a child. For the most part, bits and pieces of Ross painting and discussing the artwork resided somewhere far off in the back of my mind. Then, I checked out the most recent issue of African American Review and came across McInnis's "Saturday Serenades aka Watching Bob Ross Paint," which opens:

How much weed or whisky
must a white man consume
to have a perfect and permanent ’fro,
splashing paint as a precursor
to precision bending happy accidents
into Saturday surprises of sublime

Beyond or along with the painting, Ross was known for his signature lil 'fro, hence McInnis's comments in those opening lines. 

Later, at one point, referencing the sound of Ross speaking, McInnis writes, "His voice is a sedative— /

saturated with summer naps and spring dreams." There are points throughout the poem where McInnis is describing the painter at work and his images. Reading the piece took me back to older memories. 

A Long History of Black Poets on (and with) Artists and Artwork

McInnis's "Saturday Serenades aka Watching Bob Ross Paint" contributes to a long, long history of African American artists writing about artists and artwork. More formally, people use the term ekphrasis to refer to poets writing about artwork. As you might imagine, before the advent of video and photography, writings describing visual art was particularly valued. 

In the context of African American poetry, Phillis Wheatley's poem about artist Scipio Moorhead is perhaps the earliest example of a poet writing about an artist. Her poem “To S. M. A Young African Painter, On Seeing His Works” (1773) is part of the centuries-long road of artistic compositions leading us to C. Liegh MCinnis publishing a 2026 poem about a white dude painting rocking a fro. 

Dunbar's pome "The Photograph" (1899) contributes to the continuum of poems along this line as well. The speaker of the poem opens, "See dis pictyah in my han'? / Dat's my gal." Later the speaker goes, "She sont me dis photygraph / Jes' las' week." 

More broadly, Dunbar is important to the interaction between poems and artwork and photography because the Hampton Institute Camera Club produced illustrated books, such as Poems of the Cabin and Field (1899) and When Malindy Sings (1903) that accompanied Dunbar's poems. 

Countee Cullen's well-known poem "Heritage" is not known as a poem about artwork. However, when the poem was initially published in Survey Graphic in March 1925, the poem was accompanied by  photographs of African masks and sculptures. Those images provide added weight to the poem's famous recurring line: "What is Africa to me?" 

Countee Cullen's "Heritage," with photos of African masks and sculpture from Survey Graphic, 1925

When we look back at publications throughout the 1920s, the so-called Harlem Renaissance or New Negro Movement, we see various instances of poems appearing alongside artwork. It's also true that visual artists and poets were frequently interacting with each other and collaborating. 

Langston Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," arguably our most anthologized poem by a Black poet, was first published in 1921 in The Crisis magazine. Twenty years later, artist Aaron Douglas produced his The Negro Speaks of Rivers (For Langston Hughes, which offers a powerful visual response to the poem. 

During the 1960s, sometime around 1965, Robert Hayden wrote "Monet's Waterlilies" published in his collection Words in the Mourning Time (1970). The poem refers to Claude Monet Water Lilies series, which include about 250 oil paintings. Hayden opens the poem noting that "Today as the news from Selma and Saigon / poisons the air like fallout," he turns his attention to Monet's artwork. 

Speaking of Hayden's poem, in November 2025, the New York Times ran a piece by A.O. Scott discussing Hayden's composition. Scott noted that "the way Hayden invokes Monet’s painting shifts the mood and focus decisively away from the world’s problems." 

That point had me thinking about the way McInnis's poem on Ross took me to some other place, reflecting on the appearance of Ross on television painting and then taking my mind to the places in my childhood where I was as I watched Ross.

The Visual Productions of the Black Arts Era

Much of the scholarly work on the Black Arts Movement focuses on the writings--poems and other compositions. My own book, The Black Arts Enterprise, certainly does that as I focus on poets and print culture of the era. 

But part of what drew me to Black Arts in general was the abundance of visual productions, including striking book covers and various photographs and illustrations presented throughout Negro Digest/Black World magazine, and other publications.   

 

In 1967, Broadside Press published Gwendolyn Brooks's "The Wall: For Edward Christmas" in honor the Wall of Respect, a mural produced by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Christmas, to whom Brooks dedicated her poem, was one of the artists involved in OBAC. More than a dozen artists contributed to the Wall of Respect, and Christmas had painted the image Brooks for the mural. 

Black Poets on Jacob Lawrence, Romare Bearden, and James 

Several poets have published poems about the artwork of Jacob Lawrence. For the Museum of Modern Art's "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North" (2015), Elizabeth Alexander curated/commissioned Lawrence-inspired poems by a group of poets. That included Rita Dove's "Protocol" and "Say Grace," Nikky Finney's "Migration Portraiture," Tyehimba Jess's "Negro Migration," among others.

Others have written poems abut works by Romare Bearden. There's Reginald Harris's “'Baltimore Uproar' by Romare Bearden," and section 5 of Alexander's poem "Omni–Albert Murray" is entitled "Bearden at Work." 

I haven't many poems by poets focusing on photographers, but I am aware of Alexander's "Van Der Zee" in honor of James Van Der Zee. 

Somehow moving from McInnis, or tracing from Wheatley to McInnis had me thinking back on those poems.

And More

“July 13, 1954” by Rachel Eliza Griffiths references the death date of artist Frida Kahlo. Others have written about Kahlo including Alexander's "Painting" as well as Yusef Komunyakaa's "Frida’s Earth Mother." Also, poet celeste doaks has a poem “To the Sea, From Frida.” 

 

Rickey Laurentiis has a poem "Vanitas with Negro Boy" responding to a David Bailly painting, and "Black Iris" responding to Georgia O'Keeffe's image of the same title. The idea of taking a painting with "Black" in the title and crafting a poem drawing an association links to McInnis highlighting a white man with a fro. 

Various poets have written about Basquiat. Most extensively, Kevin Young's To Repel Ghosts focuses on the painter. For individual poems, we have works like Adrian Matejka's "& Later," Roger Reeves's "Boy Removing Fleas," and Mahogany L. Browne's "upon viewing the death of basquiat*," to name a few.

William J. Harris's Sketches 

Harris notebook entry with drawings on “Alice Neel: People Come First” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2021.

After years of observing and being interested in poets engaging artwork, I learned that in addition to writing about artists and artwork, William J. Harris sketches the artwork that interests him. He'll produce drawings that remind him of what he's seen at an exhibit. So throughout his notebooks, he has words and notations about the images he viewed. 

In an interview, I asked Harris what led him to start sketching the images. He responded, "I was thinking about the paintings, observing the paintings, and I wanted a record of them." Early in his career, he experimented with word-image poems, where he included little drawings alongside poems, like with his piece “My Friend, Wendell Berry.”

He then started drawing in journals in 2017. He said, "I would have started earlier if I hadn’t wanted to express everything in words." Producing sketches of artwork, though, was important. "My copying of the paintings," he said, "let me into the creative process and added a dimension to my enterprise."

Layers of Black Art

For quite some time, I've been interested in various kinds of layering in artistic culture. So things like masks or multiple masks or visual allusions (like Huey as Malcolm). 

So, in the context of the long history of Black poets writing about art, I was intrigued with the idea of McInnis writing about an artist at work on television. His poem is a reflection on looking at an artist and artwork through a medium beyond canvas and photograph. 

To further this layering, after reading the poem and thinking about Bob Ross, I of course went to YouTube to refresh my memory of some of those instructional videos. The Bob Ross YoTube channel, by the way, is an expansive undertaking with more than 1,000 videos. 

Watching Ross and thinking about McInnis's poem, it occurred to me that we rarely encounter works drawn from artists in the act of painting. I suppose that's one more unique contribution that McInnis made to this expansive continuum of Black poets on visual artists.  

Related:

• Black Poets and Artwork