Catalogue
Rainbow Darkness
An Anthology of African American Poetry
Edited by Keith Tuma, with photographs by Lynda Koolish
2005. 1-881163-47-4
Rainbow Darkness: An Anthology of African American Poetry gathers poems by a range of established and newer African American poets including Jeff Allen, Wanda Coleman, C. S. Giscombe, Terrance Hayes, Kim Hunter, Honorée Jeffers, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, Mendi Lewis Obadike, Reginald Shepherd, Timothy Siebles, Evie Shockley, Lorenzo Thomas, Natasha Trethewey, Anthony Walton, Crystal Williams, and Tyrone Williams, and essays by Herman Beavers, Aldon Nielsen, Kathy Lou Schultz, Evie Shockley, and Lorenzo Thomas.
The anthology grew from poems and talks presented at Marjorie Cook Conference on Diversity in African American Poetry held at Miami University in September 2003. The anthology hopes to extend the conversations that took place at the conference to another, larger audience.
Rainbow Darkness is edited by Keith Tuma, author of Fishing By Obstinate Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and American Readers.
Advance Praise for Rainbow Darkness
“The poems and essays in Rainbow Darkness allow us to sample how diversity functions in contemporary African American poetry. The anthology urges us to ponder ‘diversity within diversity’ rather than binaries that castrate serious thought. The work of the poet, to echo Lorenzo Thomas’ plenary address, is to find ‘the words to go with the music.’ As one reads Rainbow Darkness, however, the sense that music is plural intensifies; now it is probable that musics seek poets who can best use words to lessen our existential wretchedness. For anyone who has a genuine interest in poetry, Rainbow Darkness provides some of the evidence required to understand the impact of multiple consciousness on the traditions of African American poetry.
—Jerry W. Ward, Jr.
Editor of Trouble the Water:
250 Years of African American Poetry
Dillard University
“We who gathered at this conference, and you who read this anthology, have a richer, fuller sense of the vast possibilities of African American poetry, precisely because so many different voices were brought together. Potential cacophony, potential choir.” —Evie Shockley
Rainbow Darkness was reviewed by Maria Damon in the Winter 2006/2007 issue of Rain Taxi.
About the Contributors
All of the photographs below — except those of Crystal Williams, Kathy Lou Schultz, and Lynda Koolish — by Lynda Koolish.
Born in Chicago in 1962, Jeffery Renard Allen
is currently an Associate Professor of English at Queens College of The City University of New
York and an instructor in the MFA writing program
at New School University. He has published two
books, Harbors and Spirits, a collection of poems,
and the novel, Rails Under My Back, which won The Chicago Tribune’s
Heartland Prize for Fiction. Other awards include a Whiting Writer’s
Award and an honor for Pioneering Achievements in Fiction from
the African American Literature and Culture Association. His essays,
reviews, fiction, and poetry have appeared in numerous publications
and anthologies, including Poets & Writers, Ploughshares, Bomb, The
Antioch Review, Hambone, StoryQuarterly, Callaloo, Other Voices, Notre
Dame Review, Review, XCP: Cross Cultural Poetics, 110 Stories: New York
Writes after September 11, and Step into the World: A Global Anthology
of Black Literature. Forthcoming books include Stellar Places, a second
collection of poems, and Bread and the Land, a book of stories. Allen
is also at work on a new novel, Song of the Shank, a narrative based on
the life of the brilliant and controversial nineteenth-century pianist
and composer Blind Tom.
Herman Beavers is an Associate Professor of English
at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves
as Acting Director of of the Center for Africana
Studies during the 2004—05 academic year. He
received his BA in Government, Sociology, and
Creative Writing from Oberlin College (1981).
He went on to the Graduate Writing Program at Brown, where he
received the MA in Creative Writing (1983). In 1985, he received an
MA from the Afro-American Studies Program at Yale Univeristy and
in 1990 completed his doctorate in American Studies, also at Yale. He
has been at the University of Pennsylvania since 1989. Since arriving
there, he has authored the book Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fictions
of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPherson (U of Penn Press, 1995),
as well as over 25 articles and book chapters. He has guest-edited
issues of both African American Review and Narrative and he has either
served or is serving on the editorial boards of American Literature,
Modern Fiction Studies, Modern Literary Studies, and African American
Review. His creative works include the chapbook A Neighborhood of
Feeling as well as poems that have appeared in Rain, Black American
Literature Forum (now African American Review), Dark Phrases, The
Cincinnati Poetry Review, Cave Canem I and II, Callaloo and most
recently, Xconnect.
Wanda Coleman’s fiction currently appears in
Crab Orchard Review, Fiction International, High
Plains Literary Review, Obsidian III, Other Voices
and Zyzzyva. New poems appear in 88: A Journal,
Poetry International and River Styx. She is a former
columnist for the Los Angeles Times Magazine. Her
recent books from Black Sparrow Press are Bathwater Wine, winner of
the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, Mambo Hips & Make Believe
(a novel), and Mercurochrome: New Poems, bronze-medal finalist in the
National Book Awards 2001. She received a California Arts Council
fellowship in poetry in 2002. She is C.O.L.A.’s first literary fellow,
Dept. of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles, 2003-04 in fiction. Her new
books are Ostinato Vamps, Pitt Poetry Series 2003-2004, and Wanda
Coleman’s Greatest Hits: 1966-2003, Pudding House Press, 2004.
The Riot Inside Me: More Trials & Temors (autobiographical prose) is
forthcoming (Godine, 2005).
C. S. Giscombe teaches in the MFA program at Penn State. His recent poetry books include Here and Giscome Road. Into and Out of Dislocation is a collection of Giscombe’s essays. Works in progress include a poetry book about the midwest, Prairie Style, and a prose book about trains and train metaphors, titled Traveling Public.
Eric Goodman, who directed the Marjorie Cook
Conference on Diversity in African American
Poetry, teaches in and directs the Creative Writing
program at Miami University. He has published
four novels: Child of My Right Hand (Sourcebooks,
2004); In Days of Awe (Alfred A.Knopf, 1991); The
First Time I Saw Jenny Hall (William Morrow, 1983); and High on the
Energy Bridge (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1980). Other publications
include a handful of short stories and non-fiction pieces in national
publications including Saveur, GQ, Travel & Leisure, Los Angeles Times
Sunday Magazine, Buzz, Glamour, Life, and Self.
Terrance Hayes is the author of Hip Logic (Penguin
2002) and Muscular Music (Tia Chucha Press, 1999)
and has been a recipient of many awards and prizess
including a Whiting Writers Award, the Kate Tufts
Discovery Award, a National Poetry Series award,
a Pushcart Prize, a Best American Poetry selection,
and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. Wind in a Box,
his third book, is forthcoming from Penguin in the spring of 2006. A
South Carolina native, Hayes lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with
his family and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie
Mellon University.
Kim Derrick Hunter was born in Detroit to African
American working class parents in 1955. He has
been a factory worker, a security guard, a middle
school teacher and a street outreach worker. But
most of his adult life has been spent working in
media, primarily television and radio. The major
influences on his work have been Cummings, Baraka, surrealist film
and the post-industrial Detroit poetry scene. His work has appeared
in a variety of journals including: Triage, Hipology, The Metro Times,
Dispatch, Graffiti Rag and +R (Plus D’art). Past Tents Press published
Hunter’s first collection of poems, borne on slow knives, in 2001.
Both a poet and a fiction writer, Honorée Fanonne
Jeffers has published two books of poetry, The Gospel
of Barbecue and Outlandish Blues. She has won an
award from the Rona Jaffe Foundation, and poetry
fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the
Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her work has
appeared in American Poetry Review, Brilliant Corners, Callaloo, Indiana
Review, Iowa Review, The Kenyon Review, and New England Review. A
native Southerner, Honorée now lives in Oklahoma where she teaches
at the University of Oklahoma and is at work on her first novel.
The work of photographer Lynda Koolish is in the
permanent collections of the Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, the Hormel Center of the
San Francisco Public Library, the San Diego State
University Library, the Berg Collection of the New
York Public Library, and the University of California
Department of African American Studies. Her photographs have been
widely exhibited, including one-woman shows at the Schomburg, the
Jewett Gallery of the San Francisco Public Library, the San Diego State
University Library, the University of California Townsend Center for the
Humanities, the Salt Lake City Public Library, the Modern Language
Association, the American Literature Association, and the Rosenberg
Gallery at Goucher College. She also been in group shows at Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, and at 871 Fine
Arts Gallery in San Francisco. Currently a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, she is the author
and photographer of African American Writers: Portraits and Visions, a
University Press of Mississippi collection of photographic portraits and
literary biographies.
Born in Miami, Florida, in 1947, Nathaniel Mackey
grew up, from age four, in California. He is the
author of five chapbooks of poetry, Four for Trane
(Golemics, 1978), Septet for the End of Time (Boneset,
1983), Outlantish (Chax Press, 1992), Song of the
Andoumboulou: 18-20 (Moving Parts Press, 1994)
and Four for Glenn (Chax Press, 2002), and three books of poetry, Eroding
Witness (University of Illinois Press, 1985), School of Udhra (City Lights
Books, 1993) and Whatsaid Serif (City Lights Books, 1998). Strick:
Song of the Andoumboulou 16-25, a compact disc recording of poems
read with musical accompaniment (Royal Hartigan, percussion; Hafez
Modirzadeh, reeds and flutes), was released in 1995 by Spoken Engine
Company. He is also the author of an ongoing prose composition, From
a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate, of which three volumes
have been published: Bedouin Hornbook (Callaloo Fiction Series, 1986;
second edition: Sun & Moon Press, 1997), Djbot Baghostus’s Run (Sun &
Moon Press, 1993) and Atet A.D. (City Lights Books, 2001). He is editor
of the literary magazine Hambone and co-editor (with Art Lange) of the
anthology Moment’s Notice: Jazz in Poetry and Prose (Coffee House Press,
1993). He is the author of two books of criticism, Discrepant Engagement:
Dissonance, Cross-Culturality, and Experimental Writing (Cambridge
University Press, 1993; paper edition: University of Alabama Press,
2000) and Paracritical Hinge: Essays, Talks, Notes, Interviews (University of
Wisconsin Press, 2005). His awards and honors include the selection of
Eroding Witness for publication in the National Poetry Series, a Whiting
Writer’s Award in 1993 and election to the Board of Chancellors of the
Academy of American Poets in 2001. He was awarded the National Book Award for Poetry in 2006 for Splay Anthem (New Directions). He is Professor of Literature at
the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Tracie Morris is a poet who has worked in a variety
of genres including print, multimedia installation,
recorded work, visual media and live performance.
She holds multiple degrees from Hunter College,
CUNY and New York University. Morris has taught
at Queens College, CUNY, SUNY Purchase and
Sarah Lawrence College.
Harryette Mullen’s poems, short stories, and essays
have been published widely and reprinted in over
40 anthologies. Her poetry is included in the latest
edition of the Norton Anthology of African American
Literature and has been translated into Spanish,
French, Polish, and Bulgarian. She is the author
of six poetry books, most recently Blues Baby (Bucknell, 2002) and
Sleeping with the Dictionary (University of California, 2002). The latter
was a finalist for a National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle
Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In 2004 she received an
award from the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts. She
was born in Alabama, grew up in Texas, and now lives in Los Angeles,
where she teaches at UCLA.
Aldon Lynn Nielsen is the Kelly Professor of American
Literature at Pennsylvania State University. His books
of criticism include Integral Music: Languages of
African American Innovation, Black Chant: Languages
of African American Postmodernism, Writing Between
the Lines, C.L.R. James: A Critical Introduction and
Reading Race. He was the first winner of the Larry Neal Award for
poetry, and his volumes of poetry include Mixage, Vext, Heat Strings,
Evacuation Routes and Stepping Razor. The anthology Every Goodbye
Ain’t Gone, which he co-edited with Lauri Ramey, is forthcoming from
the University of Alabama Press.
Mendi Lewis Obadike is the author of Armor and
Flesh: Poems and the libretto for an internet opera
entitled The Sour Thunder. Her text-based new
media art has been commissioned by the Whitney
Museum of American Art, Yale University, and the
New York African Film Festival and Electronic Arts
Intermix, among other institutions. She received a Rockefeller New
Media Award to develop TaRonda, Who Wore White Gloves, an opera
which explores black codes of conduct. She will develop Four Electric
Ghosts (an opera based on Amos Tutuola’s novel My Life in the Bush
of Ghosts and the video game Pac Man) in Toni Morrison’s Atelier at
Princeton in the fall of 2005. Mendi lives and works with her husband
Keith in the New York metropolitan area.
James W. Richardson lives, creates, and teaches
in Atlanta, Georgia, where he is completing his
dissertation, “Theorizing a Diasporic Aesthetic
in African American and Jewish American 20th-
Century Autobiography.”
Tim Seibles is the author of Hammerlock, Body
Moves and Hurdy-Gurdy. His newest collection,
Buffalo Head Solos, has just been released by the
Cleveland State University Poetry Center. He is
a former NEA fellow and received an Open Voice
Award from the 63rd Street Y in New York City.
His work has been featured in anthologies such as Humor Me, Role
Call, Outsiders, and The Poets’ Grimm. He has led workshops for
Cave Canem — a retreat for black writers —and for the Zora Neale
Hurston/Richard Wright Foundation. He lives in Norfolk, Virginia,
where he is a member of Old Dominion University’s English Department
and MFA in Writing faculty.
Kathy Lou Schultz’s collections of poetry and
experimental fiction are Some Vague Wife (Atelos
Press), Genealogy (a+bend press), and Re dress
(San Francisco State University) — winner of the
Michael Rubin Award. Her work has recently been
published in Fence, Hambone, and Biting the Error:
Writers Explore Narrative (Coach House Press). She received her MFA
from San Francisco State University and is currently an advanced
PhD student in English at the University of Pennsylvania where her
research focuses on Afro-Modernist poetry. She is a co-founder of the
journal Lipstick Eleven.
Reginald Shepherd is the editor of The Iowa
Anthology of New American Poetries, published by
the University of Iowa Press in 2004. His fourth
book of poems, Otherhood, was published by the
University of Pittsburgh Press in 2003; it was a
finalist for the 2004 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize
and for a 2004 Lambda Literary Award. His other books, all published
by Pittsburgh, are Some Are Drowning, winner of the 1993 Associated
Writing Programs’ Award in Poetry; Angel, Interrupted, a finalist for a
1997 Lambda Literary Award; and Wrong. Winner of a 1993 “Discovery”/
The Nation Award, Shepherd has received grants from the NEA, the
Illinois Arts Council, the Constance Saltonstall Foundation, and the
Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation, among other awards and honors; his
work has also appeared in four editions of The Best American Poetry.
He currently lives and writes in Pensacola, Florida.
Evie Shockley is the author of The Gorgon Goddess
(Carolina Wren Press, 2001). Her poetry also
appears in print and online in African American
Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Brilliant Corners,
Bum Rush the Page: A Def Poetry Jam, Callaloo,
Crab Orchard Review, Hambone, HOW2, nocturnes
(re)view of the literary arts, Poetry Daily: Poems from the World’s Most
Popular Poetry Website, and other journals and anthologies. She was
awarded a residency at the Hedgebrook Retreat for Women Writers
in 2003 and belongs to several poetry communities, including Cave
Canem, the Lucifer Poetics Group, and the Carolina African American
Writers Collective. Shockley, who earned her PhD at Duke University
in 2002, is Assistant Professor of English at Wake Forest University.
Her current academic projects include a book tentatively titled Gothic
Homelessness: Domestic Ideology, Identity, and Social Terror in African
American Literature and an investigation of the relationship of race and
innovation in African American poetry.
Lorenzo Thomas (1944-2005), one of the leading poets and critics
of his generation, died on July 4th, 2005 as this
book was in production. His reading and plenary
talk were among the highlights of the conference, and
in recognition of his role as friend and guiding spirit
to many poets and scholars at the conference, this
anthology is dedicated to his memory. Lorenzo Thomas is the author
of Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and 20th-Century
American Poetry (named a 2001 Choice Outstanding Academic Book)
and several collections of poetry including Dancing on Main Street,
Chances Are Few, and The Bathers. He also edited Sing the Sun Up:
Creative Writing Ideas from African American Literature. Thomas was
Professor of English at University of Houston-Downtown.
Natasha Trethewey is the author of Bellocq’s Ophelia
(Graywolf, 2002) and Domestic Work (Graywolf,
2000). Her third collection, Native Guard, is
forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin. She is the
recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim
Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio
Study Center, the NEA, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the
Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Her poems have
appeared in such journals and anthologies as American Poetry Review,
Callaloo, Kenyon Review, The Southern Review, New England Review,
Gettysburg Review, and The Best American Poetry 2000 and 2003.
Currently, she is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing
at Emory University. During the 2005—2006 academic year, she will
hold the Lehman-Brady Joint Chair Professorship of Documentary
and American Studies at Duke and UNC Chapel Hill.
Keith Tuma is the author of Fishing by Obstinate
Isles: Modern and Postmodern British Poetry and
American Readers (Northwestern, 1998). He is the
editor of Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and
Irish Poetry (Oxford, 2001) and co-editor of Mina
Loy: Woman and Poet (NPF, 1998) and Additional
Apparitions: Poetry, Performance & Site-Specifity (The Cherry-on-Top
Press, 2002). His essays on British, Irish, American, and Anglophone
poetry have appeared in many journals and in a number of books edited
by others, including Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries
Transnationally and The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century
English Literature. His poems and performance texts have appeared
in journals including Chicago Review, Notre Dame Review, Open Letter,
Poetry Salzburg, The Gig, nth position, Flights, Famous Reporter, and in
the anthologies 100 Days and Onsets. His chapbook of poetic squibs
and epigrams Topical Ointment was published by Slack Buddha Press
in 2004. Critical Path: Into the Bush, the first volume of an ongoing
collaboration with cris cheek and William R. Howe, appeared in 2003.
He is currently Editor of Miami University Press, Professor in the English Department and Associate Dean of the College of Arts & Science at Miami University.
Anthony Walton is the author of Mississippi: An
American Journey. He teaches at Bowdoin College
in Brunswick, Maine.
Crystal Williams, a native of Detroit, Michigan, is
the author of Kin and Lunatic. Her work appears
in many journals and anthologies, including 5AM,
Callaloo, Ms. Magazine, Indiana Review, Court
Green, American Poetry: The Next Generation, Poetry
Nation, and Beyond the Frontier. She holds degrees
from NYU and Cornell University.
Tyrone Williams teaches literature and literary
theory at Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Recent publications include two chapbooks, AAB
(Slack Buddha Press, 2004) and Futures, Elections
(Dos Madres Press, 2004).