A literature of black women's courage and experience is at the heart of Maya Angelou's writing. She has been called a national institution and the people's poet. It has been suggested that she has manifested an indomitable spirit and benign will in her most famous book, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings". Enhanced by a chronology, bibliography, notes on the contributors, and an introductory essay by noted literary scholar Harold Bloom.

In this revised introduction to Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison's novels, Jan Furman extends and updates her critical commentary. New chapters on four novels following the publication of Jazz in 1992 continue Furman's explorations of Morrison's themes and narrative strategies. In all Furman surveys ten works that include the trilogy novels, a short story, and a book of criticism to identify Morrison's recurrent concern with the destructive tensions that...

"Arguing that inexpression is a gesture that acquires distinctive meanings in concert with blackness, Deadpan tracks instances and meanings of deadpan--a vaudeville term meaning 'dead face---across literature, theater, visual and performance art, and the performance of self in everyday life. Tina Post reveals that the performance of purposeful withholding is a critical tool in the work of black culture makers, intervening in the persistent framing...

"The Encyclopedia of Black Comics focuses on people of African descent who have published significant works in the United States or have worked across various aspects of the comics industry. The book focuses on creators in the field of comics: inkers, illustrators, artists, writers, editors, Black comic historians, Black comic convention creators, website creators, archivists and academics--as well as individuals who may not fit into any category...

"In the mid-1960s, African American artists and intellectuals formed the Black Arts movement in tandem with the Black Power movement, with creative luminaries like Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Toni Cade Bambara, and Gil Scott-Heron among their number. In this follow-up to his award-winning history of the movement nationally, James Smethurst investigates the origins, development, maturation, and decline of the vital but under-studied Black Arts...

The humor of African-American life is inextricably tied to the humor on the African-American stage, its character shaped by the contradictions of being Black and Bewildered and Bothered in the New World. It is a humor that breathes sanity and humanity in the midst of profound circumstances. To find logic in this existence is at the heart of the African-American comic odyssey. Writers who understand the mythic comic paradigm articulate the rage, the...