"Intertwining personal essays and interviews with distinguished poets, such as Lucille Clifton, Sonia Sanchez, Patricia Smith and Natasha Trethewey, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books and Questions that Grew Me Up, explores the impact of identity, joy, love, and history on writing and the artistic process in the latter half of the twentieth century." --

Includes selected poems and biographies of ten African- American poets: Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Harper, James Weldon Johnson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Margaret Walker, and Gwendolyn Brooks. val

"During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers-enslaved and free-allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. They borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism-its lyric poetry, prophetic visions-to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. Authors like Frances Ellen...

A collection of lullabies orally transmitted by African-American slaves revealing their hardships and sorrows as well as soothing notes of well-being and belief in a better time to come.