Sonia Sanchez S Poetic Spirit Through Haiku

This collection of ten critical essays is the first scholarly criticism of haiku by Sonia Sanchez. Her haiku, full of power and emotional voice for people, love, human nature, and African American experience, redefine haiku in English and African American poetic expression with her unique individuality.

Winner Gish Prize for Lifetime Achievement A representative collection of the life work of the much-honored poet and a founder of the Black Arts movement, spanning the 4 decades of her literary career. Gathering highlights from all of Sonia Sanchez’s poetry, this compilation is sure to inspire love and community engagement among her legions of fans. Beginning with her earliest work, including poems from her first volume, Homecoming (1969), through to 2019, the poet has collected her favorite work in all forms of verse, from Haiku to excerpts from book-length narratives. Her lifelong dedication to the causes of Black liberation, social equality, and women’s rights is evident throughout, as is her special attention to youth in poems addressed to children and young adults. As Maya Angelou so aptly put it: “Sonia Sanchez is a lion in literature’s forest. When she writes she roars, and when she sleeps other creatures walk gingerly.”

Lenard D. Moore and African American Haiku: Merging Traditions identifies Moore as a primary figure in the American Haiku Movement as well as a significant contributor to the field of African American haiku. Ce Rosenow analyzes the ways in which Moore combines haiku with a variety of other traditions: African American storytelling, jazz poetry, ekphrasis, and elegies. An examination of Moore’s haibun, a Japanese form combining prose and haiku, reveals the further development of the African American aesthetic created in his individual poems. Ultimately, the author argues that Moore’s decades-long engagement with haiku and his prolific publication history solidify haiku as an established form in African American poetry.

Poems of commemoration and loss for readers of all ages, from a leading writer of the Black Arts Movement and the American Poetry Society's 2018 Wallace Stevens Award–winner. Sonia Sanchez's collection of haiku celebrates the gifts of life and mourns the deaths of revered African American figures in the worlds of music, literature, art, and activism. In her verses, we hear the sounds of Max Roach "exploding in the universe," the "blue hallelujahs" of the Philadelphia Murals, and the voice of Odetta "thundering out of the earth." Sanchez sings the praises of contemporaries whose poetic alchemy turns "words into gems": Maya Angelou, Richard Long, and Toni Morrison. And she pays homage to peace workers and civil rights activists from Rosa Parks and Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm to Brother Damu, founder of the National Black Environmental Justice Network. Often arranged in strings of twelve or more, the haiku flow one into the other in a steady song of commemoration. Sometimes deceptively simple, her lyrics hold a very powerful load of emotion and meaning. There are intimate verses here for family and friends, verses of profound loss and silence, of courage and resilience. Sanchez is innovative, composing haiku in new forms, including a section of moving two-line poems that reflect on the long wake of 9/11. In a brief and personal opening essay, the poet explains her deep appreciation for haiku as an art form. With its touching portraits and by turns uplifting and heartbreaking lyrics, Morning Haiku contains some of Sanchez's freshest, most poignant work.

Containing the biographies of over one hundred black women who write horror, 100+ Black Women in Horror is a reference guide, a veritable who's who of female horror writers from the African Diaspora. It is an expansion of the original 2014 book 60 Black Women in Horror. February is African American History Month here in the United States. It is also Women in Horror Month (WiHM). This list of black women who write horror was compiled at the intersection of the two. It consists of an alphabetical listing of the women with biographies, photos, and web addresses, as well as interviews with 17 of these women and an essay by David Watson on LA Banks and Octavia Butler.

There are deep black nationalist roots for many of the images and ideologies of contemporary racial justice efforts. This collection reconsiders the Black Aesthetic and the revolutionary art of the Black Arts Movement (BAM), forging connections between the recent past and contemporary social justice activism. Focusing on black literary and visual art of the Black Arts Movement, this collection highlights artists whose work diverged from narrow definitions of the Black Aesthetic and black nationalism. Adding to the reanimation of discourses surrounding BAM, this collection comes at a time when today’s racial justice efforts are mining earlier eras for their iconography, ideology, and implementation. As numerous contemporary activists ground their work in the legacies of mid-twentieth century activism and adopt many of the grassroots techniques it fostered, this collection remembers and re-envisions the art that both supported and shaped that earlier era. It furthers contemporary conversations by exploring BAM’s implications for cultural and literary studies and its legacy for current social justice work and the multiple arts that support it.

In the Chinese Cultural Revolution, millions of middle school and high school graduates, called the zhiqing or Educated Youth, were sent up to the mountains and down to the countryside to receive reeducation from the poor peasants. With deep conviction that they would play an important role in the transformation of rural China, the zhiqing became field hands, never realizing that reeducation was both a physical and psychological challenge. This collection of poetry is the representation of those reeducation years in the fields. Half a century has passed, but memories remain fresh, each a page of suffering, cheering, or dreaming to turn.

American Haiku: New Readings explores the history and development of haiku by American writers, examining individual writers. In the late nineteenth century, Japanese poetry influenced through translation the French Symbolist poets, from whom British and American Imagist poets, Amy Lowell, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and John Gould Fletcher, received stimulus. Since the first English-language hokku (haiku) written by Yone Noguchi in 1903, one of the Imagist poet Ezra Pound’s well-known haiku-like poem, “In A Station of the Metro,” published in 1913, is most influential on other Imagist and later American haiku poets. Since the end of World War II many Americans and Canadians tried their hands at writing haiku. Among them, Richard Wright wrote over four thousand haiku in the final eighteen months of his life in exile in France. His Haiku: This Other World, ed. Yoshinobu Hakutani and Robert L. Tener (1998), is a posthumous collection of 817 haiku Wright himself had selected. Jack Kerouac, a well-known American novelist like Richard Wright, also wrote numerous haiku. Kerouac’s Book of Haikus, ed. Regina Weinreich (Penguin, 2003), collects 667 haiku. In recent decades, many other American writers have written haiku: Lenard Moore, Sonia Sanchez, James A. Emanuel, Burnell Lippy, and Cid Corman. Sonia Sanchez has two collections of haiku: Like the Singing Coming off the Drums (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998) and Morning Haiku (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010). James A. Emanuel’s Jazz from the Haiku King (Broadside Press, 1999) is also a unique collection of haiku. Lenard Moore, author of his haiku collections The Open Eye (1985), has been writing and publishing haiku for over 20 years and became the first African American to be elected as President of the Haiku Society of America. Burnell Lippy’s haiku appears in the major American haiku journals, Where the River Goes: The Nature Tradition in English-Language Haiku (2013).Cid Corman is well-known not only as a haiku poet but a translator of Japanese ancient and modern haiku poets: Santoka, Walking into the Wind (Cadmus Editions, 1994).