Collected & Selected Works of Black Women Poets

The publication of Elizabeth Alexander's Crave Radiance: New and Selected Poems 1990-2010 (2010) was a notable moment in the contemporary publishing history of African American poetry. Alexander serves an important connector between previous, established generations of poets and a slightly younger group of accomplished writers. 

Among black women poets, Gwendolyn Brooks's Selected Poems (1963) was an early noted collections, and years later Brooks's collected works Blacks (1987) was published. Margaret Walker's  This is My Century: New and Collected Poems was published in 1989. 

During the 1990s, noted collected and selected works included Naomi Long Madgett's Remembrances of Spring: Collected Early Poems (1993), Rita Dove's Selected Poems (1993), Nikki Giovanni's Selected Poems 1968 - 1995 (1996), and The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde (1997).

Over the last 12 years, we've seen the publication of Lucille Clifton's Blessing the Boats: New and Selected Poems 1988 - 2000 (2000), Nikki Giovanni's The Collected Poems of Nikki Giovanni, 1968 - 1998 (2003), Directed by Desire: The Complete Poems of June Jordan (2005) edited by Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks (2005) edited by Elizabeth Alexander, and Jayne Cortez's On the Imperial Highway: New and Selected Poems (2009).

I'm looking forward to the publication, later this year, of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010. The forthcoming collection is co-edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser and includes a foreword by Toni Morrison.


Related:
• Black Intellectual Histories
• The Collected Works (Readers) of Black Scholars  
• The Mis-Education of the Negro [Book Covers]