As National Poetry Month comes to a close, we're celebrating these Black women poets who have changed us with their work.

Etheridge Knight. In 1996 the Academy of American Poets dubbed April National Poetry Month to celebrate the richness of American poetry. Other talented Black female poets featured on this list include Lucille Clifton, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. List RulesVote up the top Black women poets around the world. But they all contributed immensely to poetry, the history of black poetry, black culture, and just art in general.

Poems to Give to Expecting Mothers As a Gift.

She has created spoken word recordings of many of her works, including “Truth Is On Its Way,” which features a background of gospel music. Ideas about race and equality, love and death have been clearly heard from the slave girl Phillis Wheatley to the Harlem Renaissance figure Jessie Redmon Fauset, to the strong voices of the black women poets of the 20th and 21st centuries: Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks and Nikki Giovanni. The author of 17 books of poetry, Nikki Giovanni’s work often focuses on the quest for equality, beginning with “Black Feeling, Black Talk,” published in 1968.

In its honor, here are 20 black American poets … Epstein is also a former public school teacher with 25 years' experience.

These black poets were not all famous.


He started writing poetry while he was jailed in the Indiana State Prison. The aforementioned Angelou would often perform live readings of her poetry at venues all over the world.

Born in Chicago, Brooks was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois in 1968 and received numerous other awards.

Vote up the top Black women poets around the world. She's one of the many great Black female poets celebrated on this list. The voices of black female poets have resounded in America for more than 250 years. They help us to see ourselves and make sense of the world.
Here are the 15 Black women poets you should know.

Some talented Black women poets write about love and heartbreak, while other famous African American poets are best known for expressing outrage at the way Black women are treated by society at large. They inspire us to be better and to make a difference.

The Cancer Journals, The Marvelous Arithmetic of Distance: Poems 1987-1992, Wounded in the house of a friend, Homegirls & Handgrenades, The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf, Liliane, Plot, The Provenance of Beauty; A South Bronx Travelogue, Rosa, The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni, Poems of Phillis Wheatley, The collected works of Phillis Wheatley, Soldier: A Poet's Childhood, Kissing God goodbye, Good news about the earth, Good Woman: Poems and A Memoir, Head Off & Split, On wings made of gauze, Thomas and Beulah, On the Bus with Rosa Parks. "You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise."

29 November 2017.