"A piercing, unflinching new volume offers necessary music for our tumultuous present, from "perhaps the best public poet we have" (Boston Globe). In her first volume of new poems in twelve years, Rita Dove investigates the vacillating moral compass guiding America's, and the world's, experiments in democracy. Whether depicting the first Jewish ghetto in sixteenth-century Venice or Black Lives Matter, this extraordinary poet never fails to connect...

Provides analysis of the most frequently studied poems in literature courses. Contains author biography (if attributed), poem text, poem summary, themes, style, historical context, critical overview, and criticism.

Biographical profiles of important and influential persons of African heritage who form the international black community. Covers persons of various nationalities in a wide variety of fields providing coverage of names found in today's headlines as well as selected individuals from earlier in this century whose influence continues to have an impact on contemporary life.

From the Publisher: Focusing on the making of African American society from the 1896 "separate but equal" ruling of Plessy v. Ferguson up to the contemporary period, this encyclopedia traces the transition from the Reconstruction Era to the age of Jim Crow, the Harlem Renaissance, the Great Migration, the Brown ruling that overturned Plessy, the Civil Rights Movement, and the ascendant influence of African American culture on the American cultural...