Search results for ""Author Elizabeth Alexander""

Drawing inspiration from poets like Walt Whitman, Gwendolyn Brooks and Robert Hayden, Elizabeth Alexander wrote this poem which she read at the inauguration of Barack Obama. She is the fourth poet in US history to read at a presidential inauguration. Critics have praised the poem, calling it ''beautifully subversive''. This elegant commemorative edition is published in honour of the historic occasion and will serve as a cherished reminder of one of the most closely watched inaugurations in history.

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Legendary poet Elizabeth Alexander turns her finely-honed sensibilities to the subject of blackness and the interior world of the modern African-American. Intelligent, perceptive and keenly observed, this collection of essays traces a thoughtful path through music, poetry and the outstanding social issues of the last 200 years to synthesise a remarkable picture of the modern African-American psyche. From Langston Hughes to the Rodney King video, Alexander leads her reader effortlessly over the complex terrain of art and politics to a new vision of the black interior.

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*Named a Most Anticipated Title of 2022 by TIME magazine, New York Times, Bustle, and more*In the midst of civil unrest in the summer of 2020 and following the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, Elizabeth Alexander-one of the great literary voices of our time-turned a mother's eye to her sons' and students' generation and wrote a celebrated and moving reflection on the challenges facing young Black America. Originally published in the New Yorker, the essay incisively and lovingly observed the experiences, attitudes, and cultural expressions of what she referred to as the Trayvon Generation, who even as children could not be shielded from the brutality that has affected the lives of so many Black people. The Trayvon Generation expands the viral essay that spoke so resonantly to the persistence of race as an ongoing issue at the center of the American experience. Alexander looks both to our past and our future with profound insight, brilliant analysis, and mighty heart, interweaving her voice with groundbreaking works of art by some of our most extraordinary artists. At this crucial time in American history when we reckon with who we are as a nation and how we move forward, Alexander's lyrical prose gives us perspective informed by historical understanding, her lifelong devotion to education, and an intimate grasp of the visioning power of art.This breathtaking book is essential reading and an expression of both the tragedies and hopes for the young people of this era that is sure to be embraced by those who are leading the movement for change and anyone rising to meet the moment.

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Discover the most enduring works of the legendary poet and first black author to win a Pulitzer Prize—now in one collectible volume “If you wanted a poem,” wrote Gwendolyn Brooks, “you only had to look out of a window. There was material always, walking or running, fighting or screaming or singing.” From the life of Chicago’s South Side she made a forceful and passionate poetry that fused Modernist aesthetics with African-American cultural tradition, a poetry that registered the life of the streets and the upheavals of the 20th century. Starting with A Street in Bronzeville (1945), her epoch-making debut volume, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the full arc of her career in all its ambitious scope and unexpected stylistic shifts. “Her formal range,” writes editor Elizabeth Alexander, “is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.” That technical virtuosity was matched by a restless curiosity about the life around her in all its explosive variety. By turns compassionate, angry, satiric, and psychologically penetrating, Gwendolyn Brooks’ poetry retains its power to move and surprise. About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

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There has been explosive interest in the life of Pauli Murray, as reflected in a recent profile in The New Yorker, the publication of a definitive biography, and a new Yale University college in her name. Murray has been suddenly cited by leading historians as a woman who contributed far more to the civil rights movement than anyone knew, being arrested in 1940—fifteen years before Rosa Parks—for refusing to give up her seat on a Virginia bus. Celebrated by twenty-first-century readers as a civil rights activist on the level of King, Parks, and John Lewis, she is also being rediscovered as a gifted writer of memoir, sermons, and poems. Originally published in 1970 and long unavailable, Dark Testament and Other Poems attests to her fierce lyrical powers. At turns song, prayer, and lamentation, Murray’s poems speak to the brutal history of slavery and Jim Crow and the dream of racial justice and equality.

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Here is the good stuff: poetry written by women that actually excites the thinking reader. This anthology, spanning work of the last 75 years, will broaden its readers’ notions of what defines erotic poetry. For what is more intriguing, more satisfying than strong, self-assured writing? This groundbreaking anthology includes some of our most powerful women writers—among them Sharon Olds, Elizabeth Alexander, Anne Sexton, Dorianne Laux, Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, Lucille Clifton, and Louise Glück. These poets fully demonstrate that, far from being prurient, the erotic can permeate even the most mundane aspects of life, from reading a book to buying clothes. At the same time, the collection affirms the enormous meaningfulness of poetry—its ability to express the inexpressible and to illuminate the most private and intimate of human experiences. The poets included here represent different ethnicities, geographies, social classes, and sexual preferences. The only characteristic they share is that they are women writing about sex.

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This volume accompanies the first major survey of the work of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, a London-born painter and author with roots in Ghana. Around eighty paintings, drawings, and prints from private and public collections in Europe and the United States are assembled here, joining new, previously unseen works. Yiadom-Boakye’s main theme is the human being; the women and men, painted with oil or charcoal and pastels, appear to be portraits, but are actually fictions. They are always people of Color—whereby the painter highlights the fact of their absence in European art history. Along with her paintings, the catalogue also features the artist’s texts and poems. Accompanying essays by Andrea Schlieker, Isabella Maidment, and American poet Elizabeth Alexander explain Yiadom-Boakye's impressive body of work over the past twenty years.

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Published to accompany an exhibition presented by the Museum of the African Diaspora (MoAD) in San Francisco, this new volume showcases the work of Eritrean-born artist Ficre Ghebreyesus. Many of the paintings featured are abstracts, studies of geometric color that highlight the artist’s delight in the material qualities of oil paint on canvas. This collection brings together more than a dozen of Ghebreyesus’ finest works, focusing on abstractly rendered and vivid painted landscapes, replete with water imagery and aquatic life. In all of these evocative, and often surreal, landscapes, the viewer senses myriad influences, from the craft markets of Eritrea to the musical polyrhythms of the black diaspora, the cultural layering speaking directly to the forces that shaped the artist’s life. Ghebreyesus left Eritrea as a political refugee, eventually settling in the United States, where he earned his undergraduate degree and worked as a humanitarian activist on behalf of Eritrean independence and ongoing relief issues. Along with that work on behalf of his country and its people, he studied painting at the Art Students’ League and printmaking at the Bob Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, both in New York City. He died unexpectedly in April 2012.

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