• Austenfeld Thomas

Everything begins with Phillis Wheatley, an enslaved West African woman, purchased in 1761 by a Boston merchant. Wheatley became a shrewd poetical commentator both on American politics and on American slavery practices. Two hundred years later, post-WW II American poetry began with poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who in 1950 was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. In recent decades, Rita Dove (born 1952)  and Natasha Trethewey (born 1966)  have both been United States Poets Laureate, while Claudia Rankine (born 1963) has perhaps had the greatest public resonance of the three with her incisive poems on race and identity.  Wheatley, Brooks, Dove, Rankine, and Trethewey will be central to this seminar.  Along the way, we will also sample the works of Lucille Clifton, Elisabeth Alexander, Nikki Giovanni, and Traci K. Smith (who is both a Pulitzer Prize winner and poet laureate). 

The poems written by this women offer an unusually lively, incisive, challenging perspective on the American experience by writers who know the worlds of domestic work (Brooks), academic privilege (Rankine, Dove, Trethewey), the city and the rural South.  With intricate formal challenges qua poetry, their texts at the same time question anything and everything that readers may ever have taken for granted. The richness of the American experience, both inside and beyond the parameters of what Americans call "race" is fully accessible in the work of these women poets.  

Some poems will be made available on the MOODLE platform.

Available for purchase at Librophoros:

• Rita Dove, Collected Poems
• Natasha Trethewey, Monument
• Claudia Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric
• The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks: (American Poets Project #19) Hardcover – November 17, 2005 by Gwendolyn Brooks  (Author), Elizabeth Alexander (Editor)