Tracy K. Smith

"A memoir about the author's coming of age as she grapples with her identity as an artist, her family's racial history, and her mother's death from cancer"-- "From the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: a deeply moving memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. Tracy K. Smith had a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest...

Collects the best poems from the author's award-winning books, along with new poems that confront America's historical and contemporary racism and injustices while urging us toward love as a resistance to everything that impedes it.

"First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions...

Duende, that dark and elusive force described by Federico Garcia Lorca, is the creative and ecstatic power an artist seeks to channel from within. It can lead the artist toward revelation, but it must also, Lorca says, accept and even serenade the possibility of death. The author's bold second poetry collection explores history and the intersections of folk traditions, political resistance, and personal survival. This collection gives passionate testament...

"Since 1988, The Best American Poetry series has been "one of the mainstays of the poetry publication world" (Academy of American Poets). Each volume presents a choice of the year's most memorable poems, with comments from the poets themselves lending insight into their work. The guest editor of The Best American Poetry 2021 is Tracy K. Smith, the former United States Poet Laureate, whose own poems are, Toi Derricotte's words, "beautiful and serene"...

"A new Penguin Classics series that recovers and rediscovers the work of African American poets from the 19th and 20th centuries, curated by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy As scholars of African American literature and cultural history, Bennett and McCarthy repeatedly find themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they come across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals, whose work has been neglected and, in some cases,...

In the wake of Black Lives Matter protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, this anthology, highlighting the work of some of our most powerful writers across 50 states, offers a kaleidoscopic and intimate view of the change we all underwent.

"Yi Lei published her poem "A Single Woman's Bedroom" in 1987, when cohabitation before marriage was a punishable crime in China. She was met with major critical acclaim-and with outrage-for her frank embrace of women's erotic desire and her unabashed critique of oppressive law. Over the span of her revolutionary career, Yi Lei became one of the most influential figures in contemporary Chinese poetry. Passionate, rigorous, and inimitable, the poems...