112. Poems That Kill: the Black Arts Movement

African American literature of the late 1960s reflects the Black Power movement, in the works of such authors as Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Haki Madhubuti, Larry Neal, and Sonia Sanchez.

• J.H. Bracey, S. Sanchez, and J. Smethurst (eds), SOS—Calling All Black People : a Black Arts Movement Reader (Amherst: 2014).

• A. Gayle (ed.), The Black Aesthetic (Garden City: 1971).

• L. Jones and L. Neal (eds), Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-American Writing (New York: 1969).

• A. Mitchell Within the Circle: an Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present (Durham: 1994).

• L. Neal, A. Baraka, and M. Schwartz (eds), Visions of a Liberated Future: Black Arts Movement Writings (St Paul: 1989).

---

• H. Baker, “Generational Shifts and the Recent Criticism of Afro- American Literature,” Black American Literature Forum 15 (1981), 3-21.

• J.G. Brooks, “Amiri Baraka’s Conversion to Leninist-Marxism as an Extension of the Black Arts Movement,” CLA Journal 53 (2010), 254-66.

• C. Clarke, “After Mecca”: Women Poets and the Black Arts Movement (New Brunswick: 2005).

• L.L. Forsgren, In Search of Our Warrior Mothers: Women Dramatists of the Black Arts Movement (Evanston: 2018).

• J. Fenderson, Building the Black Arts Movement: Hoyt Fuller and the Cultural Politics of the 1960s (Urbana: 2019).

• C.L. Phelps, Visionary Women Writers of Chicago’s Black Arts Movement (Jackson: 2013).

• J.E. Smethhurst, The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (Chapel Hill: 2005).

• J.E. Smethhurst, Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity (Amherst: 2020).

• D.L. Smith, “The Black Arts Movement and its Critics,” American Literary History 3 (1991), 93-110.

• K. Woodard, A Nation Within a Nation: Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Black Power Politics (Chapel Hill: 1999).

Online collection of BAM poetry