This collection of eight substantial conversations with black poets, all born after World War II and comprising the generation following the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, offers readers—scholars, students, and a public interested in poetry—insight into the wide span of cultural and aesthetic concerns in black poetry today. The book’s title, from Elizabeth Alexander’s poem “Walking,” marks the collection’s generational focus: this is the first book of interviews published featuring the post–Black Arts Movement generation of contemporary poets. Concentrating on poets born between 1945 and 1965 whose poetry came into prominence during the 1980s...

Wanda Coleman’s productivity rivals that of Yusef Komunyakaa, with fifteen books published to date. Her career is singular among the poets of this generation in that she has accomplished it without a college education and despite innumerable financial and personal hardships. Coleman’s body of work from 1977 to today tells the tale of a black woman becoming an accomplished poet without appreciable societal, institutional, or peer support. Coleman’s forthright, sometimes abrasive personality has cost her, as reactions to her highly negative review of Maya Angelou’s A Song Flung Up to Heaven for the Los Angeles Times Book Review in 2002...

Yusef Komunyakaa is perhaps the poet of greatest stature in this generation, with a substantial body of work and a highly acclaimed presence in several poetic arenas, including jazz poetry, Vietnam War poetry, and African American poetry. His fourteen books of poetry evidence a prolific poet whose writing continues unabated in his sixties; additionally, he has coedited two anthologies of jazz poetry, published a book of his interviews and essays, and collaborated on a verse play rendering of the epic tale Gilgamesh. He currently is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.

Komunyakaa was born James...

Rita Dove’s career has seemed more public than those of most others in this generation, as she served as U.S. poet laureate for two terms (1993–95), authored the weekly “Poet’s Choice” column for the Washington Post from 2000 to 2002, and has played a national and international role as an ambassador of poetry. She has published ten books of poetry, a play, a song cycle, a collection of essays, a collection of short stories, and a novel. Much of her work moves beyond views of black poetry commonly promulgated during and aft er the Black Arts Movement. She is...

Among all the poets in this collection, Mullen would be the one most likely to be labeled experimental, a label she would welcome. Mullen’s oeuvre presents interesting questions about audience, language, identity, race, and the place of theory for African American poetry—and all poetry. Her poetry and literary criticism revitalize common topics such as the oral tradition, folklore, and the blues, offering new perspectives. Her publication history is a study in the dilemma of the black poet as expressed in the work of poets from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Rita Dove, as she has navigated among audience expectations and...

Thylias Moss’s poetry has changed dramatically across her oeuvre. Her intellectually and aesthetically complex multimedia experiments stand out in this generation of poets. Her twelve books, while focusing mainly on poetry, span memoir, verse narrative, children’s literature, and drama. She is the only one of these poets to win a MacArthur Fellowship (popularly known as “the genius grant”), in 1996.

Moss was born on February 27, 1954, in Cleveland, Ohio. Moss’s childhood was both nurturing and traumatic, as she had a stable, affectionate family life with warm and loving neighbors, yet during her elementary school years she was sexually abused...

Cornelius Eady’s unique contribution to this generation of black poets lies as much in his founding of the black poets’ workshop Cave Canem with Toi Derricotte in 1996 as in his poetry. He has written seven volumes of poetry, including Hardheaded Weather: New and Selected Poems (2008). He won the 1985 Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets for Victims of the Latest Dance Craze, and his musical theater piece, Running Man, cowritten with musician Deidre Murray, was a 1999 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama. Eady is currently an associate professor of English and director of...

Cyrus Cassells has wide-ranging interests: the author of four books of poetry, he is also an actor and translator and is writing his first novel. He travels extensively and speaks four languages. He is currently a professor of English at Texas State University at San Marcos.

Cassells was born May 16, 1957, in Dover, Delaware, and was raised in Southern California. His mother was a tutor and homemaker, and his father was a graduate of West Point and career military officer who pursued a master’s degree in engineering at the University of Washington and became an aerospace engineer. Cassells’s childhood...

Elizabeth Alexander represents the youngest edge of this generation of poets following the Black Arts Movement. Her work is deeply engaged with black history and culture, inseparable from America at large. She has published five books of poetry, a play, two collections of essays, and a children’s book (coauthored with Marilyn Nelson). She is currently professor and chair of African American Studies at Yale University. In 2008, she was asked to read an original poem at the inauguration of Barack Obama as president of the United States on January 20, 2009, pulling her into national and international prominence. The poem,...