Collection of African American Poetry

African American Poetry

Edited by Arnold Rampersad and Marcellus Blount

Illustrator: Karen Barbour

Publishing Company: Sterling Children's Books

Copyright Date: 2012

52 pages

Poetry Collection

As discussed in the introductory section of this book, African American poetry was very rarely seen during the 1700's to the 1800's. This was largely due to the obstacles  and misconceptions slavery produced for these writers. Even later on into the 1900's, many Americans would not read the works of African American poets due to their race. African American writers continued to pave the way over the years to free any and all restrictions they faced. This collection contains a great variety of poetry from many different African American authors that captures the struggles faced by this culture over the years.

The majority of the poems seen within this collection are short and each poem only covers one page. At the top of the page is a short description of the author’s life and literary history. Most all of the illustrations are single page due to this layout. The artwork does a wonderful job at depicting each individual poem while still looking similar throughout. The illustrations for this book were created using watercolor, ink, and collage.

Being that we are currently celebrating Black History month, I think this would be an ideal way to incorporate this book into my classroom. This poetry collection not only includes a very lengthy, descriptive section on the history of African American literature, but I also enjoy that each piece is by a different African American author. I feel that students will gain a vast new knowledge of some of the author’s experiences through this collection works. The second way I saw that this book could be used in a classroom was in a poetry unit. This book contains many different types of poems, and therefore students would be exposed to most all types of poetry in this single book. The third way I would personally use this collection of poetry would be for the students to further research an author within this book and give the class a reflection of what they have discovered. Since I would plan to use this book in an older classroom, I feel that students could really enjoy this. I think that they would gain great insight on these author’s lives through further research on an African American author. Overall, I feel that this is a very informative book and I would use it in my classroom.