The Whiskey Of Our Discontent

“[A] superb tribute . . . [an] essential collection” of essays analyzing the works of the preeminent twentieth-century poet and voice of social justice (Booklist). Winner of the Central New York Book Award for Nonfiction Finalist for the Chicago Review of Books Award Poet, educator, and social activist Gwendolyn Brooks was a singular force in American culture. The first black woman to be named United States poet laureate, Brook’s poetry, fiction, and social commentary shed light on the beauty of humanity, the distinct qualities of black life and community, and the destructive effects of racism, sexism, and class inequality. A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks’ oeuvre—on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator. “Gwendolyn Brooks wrote and performed her magnificent poetry for and about the Black people of Chicago, and yet it was also read with anguish, delight, and awe by white people, successive waves of immigrants, and ultimately the world.” —Bill Ayers, from the Introduction

Two professors mix equal parts booze and Bard to help you through your everyday dramas. It's like having Shakespeare right there in your living room, downing a great drink and putting your crappy day in perspective.

A first-of-its-kind anthology of hip-hop poetica written for and by the people.

“The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.” —Claudia Rankine in the New York Times The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes. An array of writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets. This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks’s legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.

Celebrating the voices, current and past, that surface in lyric poetry

A BreakBeat Poets anthology, Black Girl Magic celebrates and canonizes the words of Black women across the diaspora.

Now more than ever there is a need to focus on Black men's health in higher education and ensure that future practitioners are trained to ethically and culturally serve this historically oppressed community. This textbook provides practical insight and knowledge that prepare students to work with Black men and their families from a strengths-based and social justice lens. There is a dearth in the literature that discusses the prioritization of Black men’s health within the context of how they are viewed by societal approaches to engage them in research, and health programming aimed at increasing their participation in health services to decrease their morbidity and mortality rates. Much of the extant literature is over 10 years old and doesn't account for social determinants of health, perceptions of health status, as well as social justice implications that can affect the health outcomes of this historically oppressed population including structural and systemic racism as well as police brutality and gun violence. The book's 13 chapters represent a diversity of thought and perspectives of experts reflective of various disciplines and are organized in four sections: Part I - Racial Disparities and Black Men Part II - Black Masculinity Part III - Black Men in Research Part IV - Social Justice Implications for Black Men's Health Black Men’s Health serves as a core text across multiple disciplines and can be utilized in undergraduate- and graduate-level curriculums. It equips students and educators in social work, nursing, public health, and other helping professions with the knowledge and insight that can be helpful in their future experiences of working with Black men or men from other marginalized racial/ethnic groups and their families/social support systems. Scholars, practitioners, and academics in these disciplines, as well as community-based organizations who provide services to Black men and their families, state agencies, and evaluation firms with shared interests also would find this a useful resource.

In this nuanced revisionist history of modern American poetry, John Lowney investigates the Depression era’s impact on late modernist American poetry from the socioeconomic crisis of the 1930s through the emergence of the new social movements of the 1960s. Informed by an ongoing scholarly reconsideration of 1930s American culture and concentrating on Left writers whose historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the Depression, World War II, and the Cold War, Lowney articulates the Left’s challenges to national collective memory and redefines the importance of late modernism in American literary history. The late modernist writers Lowney studies most closely---Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Thomas McGrath, and George Oppen---are not all customarily associated with the 1930s, nor are they commonly seen as literary peers. By examining these late modernist writers comparatively, Lowney foregrounds differences of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and social class and region while emphasizing how each writer developed poetic forms that responded to the cultural politics and socioaesthetic debates of the 1930s. In so doing he calls into question the boundaries that have limited the scholarly dialogue about modern poetry. No other study of American poetry has considered the particular gathering of careers that Lowney considers. As poets whose collective historical consciousness was profoundly shaped by the turmoil of the Depression and war years and the Cold War’s repression or rewriting of history, their diverse talents represent a distinct generational impact on U.S. and international literary history.