Description
Use this section to explore the poetry of Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) poets. The selected resources featured in this section are not meant to be all encompassing and bring to light varying interpretations of BIPOC poets and poetry, as well as the limitations of categorization within research guides as some identities, communities, regions, and genres overlap.
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- American poetry — African American authors
- American poetry — Arab American authors
- American poetry — Asian American authors
- American poetry — Hispanic American authors
- American poetry — Indian authors
- Asian Americans — Poetry
- Indians of North America — Poetry
- Indigenous peoples — North America — Poetry
- Native Americans — North America — Poetry
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BIPOC Poets: Anthologies by Community
African American poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & SongA literary landmark- the biggest, most ambitious anthology of Black poetry ever published, gathering 250 poets from the colonial period to the present.
Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American poetryThis landmark anthology brings together for the first time more than three hundred poems by over seventy African American poets, including Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Ai, Toi Derricotte, Rita Dove, Elizabeth Alexander, Natasha Tretheway, Major Jackson, and Kevin Young.
Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of Poetry by African Americans since 1945Presents the work of 35 African American poets who wrote, or are still writing, in the postwar era.
The Oxford Anthology of African-American PoetryThe Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry aims to offer nothing less than a definitive literary portrait of a people. Here are poems by writers as different as Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois; Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes; Gwendolyn Brooks and Amiri Baraka; Rita Dove and Harryette Mullen; Yusef Komunyakaa and Nathaniel Mackey. Acclaimed as a biographer and editor, Arnold Rampersad groups these poems as meditations on key issues in black culture, including the idea of Africa; the South; slavery; protest and resistance; the black man, woman, and child; sexuality and love; music and religion; spirituality; death and transcendence.
What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in AmericaWhat I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America is the second book in a landmark two-volume anthology that explodes narrow definitions of African American poetry by examining experimental poems often excluded from previous scholarship. The first volume, Every Goodbye Ain't Gone, covers the period from the end of World War II to the mid-1970s. In What I Say, editors Aldon Lynn Nielsen and Lauri Ramey have assembled a comprehensive and dynamic collection that brings this pivotal work up to the present day.
Grape LeavesTwenty poets are represented in this collection, fifteen of them living, five of them women. They start with Ameen Rihani and Kahlil Gibran and include celebrated contemporaries who write in Arabic or English or both.
Inclined to SpeakAn indispensable and historic volume, Inclined to Speak gathers together poems, from the most important contemporary Arab American poets offering up 160 poems.
Another Way to DanceThis anthology includes selected works of some of the most active and dynamic contemporary poets writing in North America. Reflecting to varying degrees sensibilities based on ancestral Asian homelands and on lives in Canada and the United States, the poetry reproduced here is of a wide-ranging appeal and refreshing modernity, depicting a shifting, kaleidoscopic landscape of cultural and spiritual heterogeneity and individual interpretations.
Asian American PoetryThis exciting anthology of work by up-and-coming writers is the first to profile a new generation of Asian American poets. Building on the legacy of now-canonized poets, such as Li-Young Lee, Cathy Song, and Garrett Hongo, who were the first to achieve widespread recognition in the American literary community, this new generation also strikes off in bold new directions.
Diasporic Poetics : Asian Writing in the United States, Canada, and AustraliaThis book advances a new concept of the "Asian diaspora" that creates links between Asian American, Asian Canadian, and Asian Australian identities. Drawing from comparable studies of the black diaspora, it traces the histories of colonialism, immigration, and exclusion shared by these three populations. The work of Asian poets in each of these three countries offers a rich terrain for understanding how Asian identities emerge at the intersection of national and transnational flows, with the poets' thematic and formal choices reflecting the varied pressures of social and cultural histories, as well as the influence of Asian writers in other national locations.
Go Home!Asian diasporic writers imagine “home” in the twenty-first century through an array of fiction, memoir, and poetry. Both urgent and meditative, this anthology moves beyond the model-minority myth and showcases the singular intimacies of individuals figuring out what it means to belong.
Making history happen : Caribbean poetry in AmericaEngaging familiar themes and issues of time, language, and identity, the works in this anthology focus on signifying moments in the works of the poets under discussion. Reflecting on some of the ways that transnational women poets of the black diaspora are using tropes of mobility to create a renewed sense of identity and a sense of belonging to a communal network, the readings also demonstrate that the project of re-writing individual self-identity in light of one's expanding consciousness or awareness of the other is more urgent, and more demandingly realistic, in contemporary poetry written by women poets who occupy transnational spaces. In these works, re-memory becomes a process that transforms, the gathering of memory reflecting the interrelatedness of communal and individual subjective identities.
The Oxford Book of Caribbean VerseIn The Oxford Book of Caribbean Verse, Stewart Brown and Mark McWatt have come together to produce the only anthology of Caribbean poetry available that represents all of the Caribbean--not only the English language writers. The book features a range of poets, from Derek Walcott and Edward Braithwaite to Jesus Cos Causse, and from Olive Senior to Una Marson. It covers less acclaimed poets of the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, as well as exciting newer voices from the 80s and 90s.
¡Manteca!Containing the work of more than 40 poets--equally divided between men and women--who self-identify as Afro-Latino, ¡Manteca! is the first poetry anthology to highlight writings by Latinos of African descent.
Mariposas : A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino PoetryMariposas: A Modern Anthology of Queer Latino Poetry is a ground-breaking poetry collection edited by Emanuel Xavier. The collection features the work of 17 poets from across the United States and Buenos Aires. Featured poems are published in English and Spanglish with several translated into or from Spanish.
Poetry of ResistancePoetry of Resistance offers a selection of works featured on the "Poets Responding to SB 1070" Facebook page which address a wide variety of themes, including racial profiling, xenophobia, cultural misunderstanding, violence against refugees, shared identity, and much more.
Writing GrandmothersThis anthology is the second volume of the cross-continental anthologies series, particularly focusing on African and Latin American writers. It has 6 nonfiction pieces, 10 fiction pieces, and 67 poems and translations of poems in the two dominant languages of the two continents, English and Spanish. There is work from poets and writers from Honduras, Mexico, USA, UK, Cuba, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Chile Puerto Rico, Spain, Nigeria, South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Equatorial Guinea, and Ghana all collaborating on the theme of using the folktale or oral African story telling traditions and finding solutions to problems bedeviling the two continents, which were felt as a result of colonialism and or post colonialism.
Living Nations, Living WordsJoy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry.
New Poets of Native NationsNew Poets of Native Nations gathers poets of diverse ages, styles, languages, and tribal affiliations to present the extraordinary range and power of new Native poetry. Heid E. Erdrich has selected twenty-one poets whose first books were published after the year 2000.
Sovereign EroticsThis landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two.
Weaving Sundown in a Scarlet LightIn this selection of poems Joy Harjo, a three-term US Poet Laureate, celebrates her fifty years as a poet. While musical, intimate, political and wise, they intertwine ancestral memory and tribal histories with resilience and love. From her early discoveries for her own voice to moving reflections of our contemporary movement, she offers poems on birth, death, love, and resistance-- and everything they encompass.
When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came ThroughUnited States Poet Laureate Joy Harjo gathers the work of more than 160 poets, representing nearly 100 Indigenous nations, into the first historically comprehensive Native poetry anthology. This landmark anthology celebrates the Indigenous peoples of North America, the first poets of this country, whose literary traditions stretch back centuries.
Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-LiteraturesIn this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play--all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation.
Pacific Literatures As World LiteraturePacific Literatures as World Literature is a conjuration of trans-Pacific poets and writers whose work enacts forces of "becoming oceanic" and suggests a different mode of understanding, viewing, and belonging to the world. The Pacific, past and present, remains uneasily amenable to territorial demarcations of national or marine sovereignty. With ground-breaking writings from authors based in North America, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Hawaii, and Guam and new modes of research - including multispecies ethnography and practice, ecopoetics, and Indigenous cosmopolitics - authors explore the socio-political significance of the Pacific and contribute to the development of a collective effort of comparative Pacific studies covering a refreshingly broad, ethnographically grounded range of research themes.
The Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander LiteratureThe Routledge Companion to Asian American and Pacific Islander Literature offers a general introduction as well as a range of critical approaches to this important and expanding field. With 41 essays from scholars in the field this collection is a comprehensive guide to a significant area of literary study for students and teachers of Ethnic American, Asian diasporic and Pacific Islander Literature.
Whetū Moana : contemporary Polynesian poems in EnglishWhetū Moana is the first anthology of contemporary Indigenous Polynesian poetry to be written in English and edited by Polynesians.
BIPOC Poets: General Anthologies
Infinite ConstellationsThe innovative fictions in Infinite Constellations showcase the voices and visions of 30 remarkable writers, both new and established, from the global majority: Native American/First Nation writers, South Asian writers, East Asian writers, Black American writers, Latinx writers, and Caribbean and Middle Eastern writers.
The Princeton Handbook of Multicultural PoetriesIn compiling material on 106 cultures in 92 national literatures, the book gives full coverage to Indo-European poetries (all the major Celtic, Slavic, Germanic, and Romance languages, as well as other obscure ones such as Hittite), the ancient middle Eastern poetries (Hebrew, Persian, Sumerian, and Assyro-Babylonian), subcontinental Indian poetries (the widest linguistic diversity), Asian and Pacific poetries (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Mongolian, and half a dozen others), continental American poetries (all the modern Western cultures and native Indian in North, Central, and South American regions), and African poetries (ancient and emergent, oral and written).
The Princeton Handbook of World PoetriesAn authoritative and comprehensive guide to poetry throughout the world The Princeton Handbook of World Poetries--drawn from the latest edition of the acclaimed Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics--provides a comprehensive and authoritative survey of the history and practice of poetry in more than 100 major regional, national, and diasporic literatures and language traditions around the globe.
Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural PoetryThis powerful and moving collection of poems stretches across the boundaries of skin color, language, ethnicity, and religion to give voice to the lives and experiences of ethnic Americans. With extraordinary honesty, dignity, and insight, these poems address common themes of assimilation, communication, and self-perception.
Voices: Poetry and Art from Around the WorldAn international collection of poetry illustrates the places and scenes of each poet's home with selected paintings, folk art, historical artifacts, and evocative photographs.
BIPOC Poets: Web Sites
- African American Poetics Online Archive (Coming Soon!)Center for African American Poetry and Poetics
- Cave Canem FoundationFounded by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady in 1996 to remedy the under-representation and isolation of African American poets in the literary landscape, Cave Canem Foundation is a home for the many voices of African American poetry and is committed to cultivating the artistic and professional growth of African American poets.
- Furious Flower Poetry CenterThe nation's first academic center for Black poetry, Furious Flower was established on the James Madison University campus to serve creative writers, literary and cultural scholars, and poetry lovers everywhere.
- Living Nations, Living Words: A Map of First Peoples PoetryFor Joy Harjo's signature project as the 23rd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, she digitally maps the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems.
- The PALABRA ArchiveThe PALABRA Archive at the Library of Congress dates back to 1943. Historically known as the Archive of Hispanic Literature on Tape (AHLOT), this collection contains nearly eight-hundred recordings of poets and prose writers participating in sessions at the Library’s Recording Laboratory and at other locations around Latin America.
- Publishers that Champion Writing by People of Color (Community of Literary Magazines and Presses)These independent literary magazines and presses champion the work of writers of color. To send us suggestions for adding to this list, please email info@clmp.org.