Professor Jerry Ward Observes National Poetry Month

30 BOOKS FOR THE “CRUELEST MONTH”

Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

Langston Hughes, Ask Your Mama: Twelve Moods for Jazz

Lucille Clifton, An Ordinary Woman

Mari Evans, I Am A Black Woman

Brenda Marie Osbey, Ceremony for Minneconjoux

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Gospel of Barbecue

Gwendolyn Brooks, Blacks

E. Ethelbert Miller, Season of Hunger/Cry of Rain

Alice Walker, Revolutionary Petunias

James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones

Alvin Aubert, Against the Blues

Eugene B. Redmond, Songs from an Afro/Phone

Bob Kaufman, The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956-1978

Ahmos Zu-Bolton, Ain’t No Spring Chicken

Lorenzo Thomas, Chances are Few

Amiri Barak, Somebody Blew Up America and Other Poems

Kalamu ya Salaam, Revolutionary Love

Margaret Walker, For My People

Robert Hayden, Words in the Morning Time

Yusef Komunyakaa,  Thieves of Paradise

Don L. Lee, We Walk the Way of the New World

Michael Harper, Nightmare Begins Responsibility

Ishmael Reed, Conjure: Selected Poems, 1963-1970

Elizabeth Alexander, The Venus Hottentot

Sterling A. Brown, Southern Road

Tom Dent, Blue Lights and River Songs

Sonia Sanchez, A Blues Book for Blue Black Magical Women

Sterling D. Plumpp, Blues: The Story Always Untold

Audre Lorde, Cables to Rage

Lance Jeffers, When I Know the Power of My Black Hand

AS IF A MONTH COULD HARBOR GENIUS

                                                                                                         Jerry W. Ward, Jr.