We must pay keen attention to who’s in the moment and who’s left out, and why. “And also the way in which black males have been seen as targets; we know there were women, too, but the people we can name are men.” This raises a crucial question about black women and (in)visibility, but more on that later. Her ear is that of a poet’s, her sensibility that of a born anarch. Here follows a woefully incomplete roll call: Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer, 2015. Her otherworldliness tells the truth about the world. She brings to life a game of chess with a line like “You can be the king but watch the queen conquer” before going into blistering bars that essentially leave every male on a song with her in the dust. All of this is exacerbated by the fact of maleness in our sexist society: Men, even vilified men, outrank women in the hierarchy of being; they are more seen. Location: The library at Brooklyn Historical Society. What I love most about Toni Cade Bambara’s “Gorilla, My Love” (1972) is its unabashed celebration of blackness. It’s difficult to choose one over the other, but the novel “Mr. Even as African-American writing currently experiences unprecedented mainstream appeal and critical recognition, the focus on black expression has another, uglier face: a deadly obsession with black bodies. Four days before Lamar received his Pulitzer, a white man in a Michigan suburb opened fire on a 14-year-old black boy when he knocked on his door to ask for directions after missing the school bus. Percival Everett has written nearly 30 books since 1983, but wide recognition didn’t come until he published “Erasure,” in 2001, a sharp satire about a failing black writer who becomes the next hot thing when he parodies another character’s book called “We’s Lives in Da Ghetto.” Such recognition typically sparks in that instant when white literary influencers tune the dial to a station that’s been playing for a long, long time. To be sure, there is much to celebrate, but these recent developments are not without complication. Here, I must confess to an unease with any gendered division of contemporary literature: When I was asked to consider the particularities of the current landscape, I wondered if a focus on male achievement might obscure the equally unprecedented successes of African-American women. In the past, African-American writers carried two burdens: to prove our humanity to white readers while also fighting to be taken seriously as writers of so-called universal literature. Let it be as broad as they have the talent to make it. Yusef Komunyakaa (pictured on one of the covers) wears an Ermenegildo Zegna tie.

“I can’t help but think this comes out of the eight years of Barack Obama … and the backlash against him,” says Farah Griffin, an author and scholar of black literature at Columbia University. What matters here, what’s more striking than the sums exchanged or the awards received, is the intense focus on works by African-American men in America’s artistic landscape, even as the problems of race and racial violence continue to plague the nation. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. A surge of mainstream attention to blackness and its literature isn’t unprecedented in periods of American crisis. Carolivia Herron’s novel “Thereafter Johnnie” (1991) — with lyrical grace and a concise rendering of the epic tradition — depicts the unraveling of a black middle-class family that is undone by incest and addiction yet revitalized by the journey of the youngest girl’s search for answers in the ruins. But even more important, she is fun to read. The last decade has seen a burgeoning multiplicity in America’s literature, with gifted black men writing novels, poems and plays of great import. And we must be vigilant. The novel has one of my favorite lines in all of literature: “How much is a nigger supposed to take?” The line speaks volumes about what it means to be a black person in this country. 13 Black women playwrights you should know 1. George C. Wolfe -- Poised to be a major black playwright thanks to Spunk, The Colored Museum, which sniped at the kinds of plays the aforementioned Hansberry used … The sale was a triumph: A black multimillionaire bought a black artist’s painting for the highest sum ever paid for the work of a living African-American artist. Her community was not cool with her “acting like a man.”. Like Kincaid, I’m American but by way of Antigua, and it’s difficult to put into words what it’s like to read the small place where you’re from — a place so small that it sometimes doesn’t even appear on a map — dipped in amber by a great writer. Contemporary black literature has a kind of boundlessness, topically and artistically. Not only does it do things that seem strange in the world of the novel, but they seem un-fixedly strange — scenes shift suddenly, locations themselves move from place to place. And what happens if you think you are but you aren’t really? It’s not only a great novel powered by an unshakable sense of what the sentence — like a stethoscope — can discover within the human heart, it’s also a poignant map to a world that forms an essential part of who I am. Perhaps, or perhaps not. That’s old news, but it’ll never get old to me: Black male rappers have been so maligned as to render his award almost unimaginable to those of us who have loved the music for decades. Let it be wide open. In “Coal” (1976), Audre Lorde writes: “I / is the total black, being spoken / from the earth’s inside.” And there, I was born afresh in that little hovel of a cottage during the early 2000s in an overly hot summer in Austin, Tex., the ladybugs sticking to the windows, the raccoons fighting the stray cats in the dry creek bed just to the west of my bedroom wall.

It is the first American poem, I feel, that reports that living contradiction from within that contradiction. Potter” stands out in my mind because of its formal beauty and subversive intent. Today’s black writers approach the subject of race, if they approach it at all, with greater freedom than ever before: Many writers today do handle the subject, obliquely or head-on. Set designer: Theresa Rivera at Mary Howard. I love how Zora Neale Hurston plays by her own rules on the page. Lucille Clifton is one of the finest poets this country has been blessed to call its own, and “Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980” (1987) is a masterpiece. Named a MacArthur Genius in 2016, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is on his … And more favorite works from men not pictured here. Safiya Sinclair’s debut book, “Cannibal” (2016), is a devastating and beautiful renegotiation — on her terms — of the English language. Toni Morrison’s prose in “Beloved” (1987) is astounding, and the subject matter intense. We rely on readers like you to uphold a free press. First row, from left: Robert Jones Jr. wears a Gucci jacket and pants, gucci.com, Arcady shirt, arcady.com, Drake’s tie, drakes.com, and Aquatalia shoes, aquatalia.com; Nathan Alan Davis wears a Tommy Hilfiger suit, tommy.com, and Gitman Bros. tie, gitman.com; Rowan Ricardo Phillips wears a Sandro suit, similar styles at sandro-paris.com, Canali shirt, (212) 752-3131, Hermès tie, hermes.com, and Michael Kors shoes, michaelkors.com; Jamel Brinkley wears a Brunello Cucinelli suit, (212) 334-1010, Louis Vuitton shirt, louisvuitton.com, Tommy Hilfiger tie and shoes; Gregory Pardlo wears a Loro Piana jacket, loropiana.com, Ermenegildo Zegna shirt, zegna.com, Louis Vuitton pants, Tommy Hilfiger tie and Mr P. shoes, mrporter.com; Dinaw Mengestu wears a Salvatore Ferragamo jacket, (866) 337-7242, The Row shirt and pants, (212) 755-2017, The Tie Bar tie, thetiebar.com, and Church’s shoes, church-footwear.com; Major Jackson wears a Tallia Orange suit, macys.com, and Brioni shirt, brioni.com. I was knocked out by the range of characters and her ability to bring the Younger family to life. When I first read “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie” (2012) and saw how deeply Ayana Mathis had submerged herself into the study of complex relationships between mothers and their children, I knew I wanted to work with her. I admire Jamaica Kincaid’s work. It is a remarkable novel — a book that stands in conversation with all these iconic strands of American literature and yet is in no way defined by them. By clicking “I agree” below, you consent to the use by us and our third-party partners of cookies and data gathered from your use of our platforms. Jeremy O. Harris (pictured on one of the covers) wears a Louis Vuitton jacket, shirt and pants. To be loved … hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world.”. “The Third Life of Grange Copeland” (1970) by Alice Walker taught me something incredible and essential: The cruelest of us are often victims, too. ... imagines an afterlife in which the spirits of young black men try to comprehend how … But if I were tasked with assembling my own very particular list of favorite books by brilliant living black women poets I’ve learned from, and been led by, among them would be: “Crave Radiance” (2012) by Elizabeth Alexander, “Captivity” (1989) by Toi Derricotte, “Hemming the Water” (2013) by Yona Harvey, “Native Guard” (2007) by Natasha Trethewey, “Sleeping With the Dictionary” (2002) by Harryette Mullen, “Madwoman” (2017) by Shara McCallum, “Life on Mars” (2011) by Tracy K. Smith, and “Shake Loose My Skin” (2000) by Sonia Sanchez. Kincaid creates a modernist literature from the Caribbean peasant experience and, in so doing, opens up colonial history in a way that is neither doctrinaire nor sentimental. These 32 American men, and their peers, are producing literature that is essential to how we understand our country and its place in the world right now. The book is wiser, more attuned to the ways race and class, violence and poverty have shaped and continue to shape this country than just about anything else I’ve encountered. James McBride, National Book Award, 2013. In “Forest Primeval” (2015), her powers are harrowing and transcendent. Vievee Francis’s poems are boiled in history, riddled with fists full of flora, straddled across fairy tale and fact and married in body and blood song. The anarchic drawings of her art-poetry collection “Prose Architectures” (2017) and the errant textures of the essay collection “Calamities” (2016) sound so deep and feel so hard that one can’t imagine how easily she requires and allows us to imagine. I was inspired and emboldened the first time I came across “Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937). Pages in category "African-American dramatists and playwrights" The following 139 pages are in this category, out of 139 total. The poet Jericho Brown says black people don’t have the luxury of being quiet: Every black behavior, no matter how banal — getting out of a car, walking down the street — draws attention or ire. See our, Read a limited number of articles each month, You consent to the use of cookies and tracking by us and third parties to provide you with personalized ads, Unlimited access to washingtonpost.com on any device, Unlimited access to all Washington Post apps, No on-site advertising or third-party ad tracking. With fluent, dead-serious joy, Gladman refuses the distinction between practice and game as fearlessly as Allen Iverson, if Allen Iverson were also Gayl Jones.

Is, say, “The Brothers Karamazov” narrow or provincial because it’s about a few Russians in the 19th century? See our Privacy Policy and Third Party Partners to learn more about the use of data and your rights. One of the most interesting things about it is Gladman’s world building — the novel treats the reader as foreign, just as the country in which the protagonist finds herself treats her as foreign. Over and over, I read “Coal” to myself, out loud, to the mosquitoes, to the stray cats that would come up from their fighting; I read the poem to anyone who would listen because it spoke of the dark — “blackness” — as a kind of opening, as that which speaks, as that which makes love. Yet all the while one hears — at least it’s clear to my ear — her still relishing in that English, making a new queendom of it, if only for its own lush, if sick, beauty.