To celebrate poetry for Black History Month, we’ve curated a selection of poems, by both debut and veteran poets, that showcase Black history, historical figures, and everyday people. We’ve also gathered a beautiful selection of upcoming and new poetry collections, including a new poetry anthology featuring poems from Jericho Brown, Tracy K. Smith, Warsan Shire, and more.

For generations Black poets have used their verse for storytelling, for showing resistance, and for self expression. It is a canvas they use to capture the struggles, dreams, trials, and beauty of the Black experience. Poets of the past inspired cultural movements and challenged societal norms. Today Black poets continue the tradition by shaping the world of poetry and inspiring change in the world.

This Black History Month, lets celebrate Black poets by reading their work, engaging with their stories, and learning about their cultural and historical impact on the world.

Araminta, by Amanda Gunn

Before General, before Moses or Harriet, she wascalled Minty. Araminta: a name of two roots.Arabella “yields to prayer”; Aminta “defends.”And, O, where ends the might of that arm? continue…

Canary, by Rita Dove

Billie Holiday’s burned voicehad as many shadows as lights,a mournful candelabra against a sleek piano,the gardenia her signature under that ruined face. continue…

25 days after I am born, by Remica Bingham-Risher

a man is killed in Mobile, Alabama. It is 1981, nearest what some will call the last lynching in America. The business of our nation goes forward—a star leads and hostages are freed while Michael Donald walks from the corner store. He is 19, the youngest of six, a college boy.  continue…

Citizen: “You are in the dark, in the car…”, by Claudia Rankine

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there. continue…

New Poetry Collections

This is The Honey, edited by Kwame Alexander

A breathtaking poetry collection on hope, heart, and heritage from the most prominent and promising Black poets and writers of our time, edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author Kwame Alexander.

In this comprehensive and vibrant poetry anthology, bestselling author and poet Kwame Alexander curates a collection of contemporary anthems at turns tender and piercing and deeply inspiring throughout. Featuring work from well-loved poets such as Rita Dove, Jericho Brown, Warsan Shire, Ross Gay, Tracy K. Smith, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, and Nikki Giovanni, This Is the Honey is a rich and abundant offering of language from the poets giving voice to generations of resilient joy, “each incantation,” as Mahogany L. Browne puts it in her titular poem, is “a jubilee of a people dreaming wildly.”

This essential collection, in the tradition of Dudley Randall’s The Black Poets and E. Ethelbert Miller’s In Search of Color Everywhere, contains poems exploring joy, love, origin, race, resistance, and praise. Jacqueline A.Trimble likens “Black woman joy” to indigo, tassels, foxes, and peacock plumes. Tyree Daye, Nate Marshall, and Elizabeth Acevedo reflect on the meaning of “home” through food, from Cuban rice and beans to fried chicken gizzards. Clint Smith and Cameron Awkward-Rich enfold us in their intimate musings on love and devotion. From a “jewel in the hand” (Patricia Spears Jones) to “butter melting in small pools” (Elizabeth Alexander), This Is the Honey drips with poignant and delightful imagery, music, and raised fists.

Fresh, memorable, and deeply moving, this definitive collection a must-have for any lover of language and a gift for our time.

Glory, Too, by Nikki Grimes

Winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, and New York Times bestselling author Nikki Grimes introduces Glory, Too, a soul-stirring collection of poetry that delves into the depths of faith, hope, and the human experience by one of America’s preeminent black poets.

In a marriage of poetry, faith, and worship, Ms. Grimes’ poems illuminate the Scriptures that grace every Sunday of the year. Her inimitable voice and imagination offer glimpses of glory we might not otherwise see, throughout the seasons of the year.

With lyrical precision and spiritual insight, she invites readers on a journey of reflection, weaving together themes of grace, redemption, and the enduring power of God’s love throughout the year.

As the companion volume to her previous book Glory in the Margins: Sunday Poems, Glory, Too resonates with authenticity and depth, giving testimony to the transformative power of poetry and the enduring hope found in the embrace of God’s eternal grace.

Bluff, by Danez Smith

Written after two years of artistic silence, during which the world came to a halt due to the COVID-19 pandemic and Minneapolis became the epicenter of protest following the murder of George Floyd, Bluff is Danez Smith’s powerful reckoning with their role and responsibility as a poet and with their hometown of the Twin Cities. This is a book of awakening out of violence, guilt, shame, and critical pessimism to wonder and imagine how we can strive toward a new existence in a world that seems to be dissolving into desolate futures.

Smith brings a startling urgency to these poems, their questions demanding a new language, a deep self-scrutiny, and virtuosic textual shapes. A series of ars poetica gives way to “anti poetica” and “ars america” to implicate poetry’s collusions with unchecked capitalism. A photographic collage accrues across a sequence to make clear the consequences of America’s acceptance of mass shootings. A brilliant long poem–part map, part annotation, part visual argument–offers the history of Saint Paul’s vibrant Rondo neighborhood before and after officials decided to run an interstate directly through it.

Bluff is a kind of manifesto about artistic resilience, even when time and will can seem fleeting, when the places we most love–those given and made–are burning. In this soaring collection, Smith turns to honesty, hope, rage, and imagination to envision futures that seem possible.

Woman, Eat Me Whole: Poems, by Ama Asantewa Diaka

A bold, mesmerizing debut collection exploring womanhood, the body, mental illness, and what it means to move between cultures

Renowned for her storytelling and spoken-word artistry, Ama Asantewa Diaka is also an exultant, fierce, and visceral poet whose work leaves a lasting impact.

Touching on themes from perceptions of beauty to the betrayals of the body, from what it means to give consent to how we grapple with demons internal and external, Woman, Eat Me Whole is an entirely fresh and powerful look at womanhood and personhood in a shifting world. Moving between Ghana and the United States, Diaka probes those countries’ ever-changing cultural expectations and norms while investigating the dislocation and fragmentation of a body–and a mind–so often restless or ill at ease.

Vivid and bodily while also deeply cerebral, Woman, Eat Me Whole is a searing debut collection from a poet with an inimitable voice and vision.

Don’t stop here. Continue to celebrate with poetry for Black History Month through reading Black authors, discovering new Black Poets, or visit a Black-owned bookstore. Check out our latest articles for more ways you can celebrate Black History Month.