The year in African American poetry, 2015

Treasure S. Redmond and Tara Betts published books comprised of kwansabas in 2015.

This past year, I kept tabs on several activities, news items, and publishing concerning African American poetry. What follows is a partial list of developments that caught my attention.

Select volumes of poetry in 2015:

Amiri Baraka's S O S: Poems 1961-2013
Tara Betts's 7 x 7: kwansabas
Kyle Dargan’s Honest Engine
Celeste Doaks's Cornrows and Cornfields
Vievee Francis’s Forest Primeval
Ross Gay’s Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude
Christopher Gilbert's Turning into Dwelling
Rachel Eliza Griffiths's Lighting the Shadow
Terrance Hayes’s How to Be Drawn
Angela Jackson’s It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time
Major Jackson's Roll Deep
Patricia Spears Jones’s A Lucent Fire: New & Selected Poems
Rickey Laurentiis’s Boy with Thorn
Robin Coste Lewis's Voyage of the Sable Venus
Nate Marshall’s Wild Hundreds
Marilyn Nelson’s My Seneca Village
Treasure Shields Redmond's chop: a collection of kwansabas for fannie lou hamer
Ronald V. Wilson’s Farther Traveler

Select collections in 2015:

What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America edited by Aldon Nielsen and Lauri Ramey
The BreakBeat Poets edited by Kevin Coval, Quraysh Ali Lansana, Nate Marshall 

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• January: Elizabeth Alexander appointed the inaugural Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

• January: Elizabeth Alexander named Chancellor to Poetry Academy.

• February: Nathaniel Mackey awarded Bollingen Prize for Poetry.

• March: Kamau Brathwaite receives the Robert Frost award.

• March: Aracelis Girmay and Roger Reeves are among Whiting Writers' Award winners.

• March: Claudia Rankine awarded the National Book Critics Circle for Poetry for Citizen.

• April: Thomas Sayers Ellis and Rowan Ricardo Phillips awarded Guggenheim Fellowships.

• April: Jericho Brown awarded Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for The New Testament.

• April: Ross Gay selected as Radcliffe Institute Fellowship recipient.

• April: Gregory Pardlo awarded Pulitzer for Poetry for Digest.

• June: Danez Smith awarded Lambda Literary Award for [insert] boy.

• July: Black Poetry After the Black Arts Movement, an NEH Institute, led by Maryemma Graham took place.

• September: Nate Marshall awarded Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

• September: Jamila Woods awarded Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowships.

• September: Elizabeth Alexander joins faculty at Columbia University. 

• October: Joshua Bennett is selected as a National Poetry Series winner. 

• October: Ford Foundation appoints Elizabeth Alexander as director of Creativity and Free Expression.

• November: Robin Coste Lewis awarded National Book Award for Poetry for Voyage of the Sable Venus.

• November: A. Van Jordan wins Lannan Literary Award for Poetry.

Related:
• A Notebook on 2015 Poetry Reflections
• The year in African American poetry, 2014
• The year in African American poetry, 2013
• The year in African American poetry, 2012
• The year in African American poetry, 2011