15 Scholarly Books on African American Poetry

Unlike my list of 105 volumes of poetry published since 2000, my list of scholarly books on African American poetry is far shorter. In comparison to the broader body of literary scholarship, there are a relatively small number of book-length works that concentrate on poetry.

Early on, a key book for me was Eugene B. Redmond's Drumvoices: The Mission of Afro-American Poetry (1976). The scholars and works listed here do not represent a comprehensive list by the way, just some of the books useful for me as I worked on my own book, The Black Arts Enterprise (2011). 

1997 -- Black Chant by Aldon Nielsen

1999 -- Dudley Randall, Broadside Press, and the Black Arts Movement in Detroit, 1960-1995 by Julius Eric Thompson 

1999 -- The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry edited by Joanne Gabbin

2000 -- Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century American Poetry by Lorenzo Thomas

2001 -- Black Protest Poetry by Margaret Reid

2004 -- Afro-Blue: Improvisations in African American Poetry and Culture by Tony Bolden

2004 -- Wrestling with the Muse: Dudley Randall and the Broadside Press by Melba Joyce Boyd

2004 -- Integral Music: Languages of African-American Innovation by Aldon Nielsen

2004 --  'After Mecca': Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement by Cheryl Clarke

2005 -- The Black Arts Movement: : Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s by James Smethurst

2005 -- Fettered Genius: The African American Bardic Poet from Slavery to Civil Rights by Keith D. Leonard

2009 -- The Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop by Adam Bradley

2011 -- The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word by Meta DuEwa Jones

2011 -- Renegade Poetics: Black Aesthetics and Formal Innovation in African American Poetry by Evie Shockley

2012 -- The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness by Kevin Young

Related:
• Black Intellectual Histories