Our Amanda Gorman Inspired Poetry Reading List

A deep, beautiful, and comprehensive overview of African American poetry from 1770 to the present day. You could literally teach a years-long seminar built around this book. In 1,000+ pages, editor Kevin Young acknowledges in his engaging and moving introduction that page constrictions required him to leave out “verse for young people,” “folk songs and ballads,” as well as longer prose poems. That’s OK. That just means we have additional volumes to look forward to.

How do you make words jump off a page? How do you convey the passion in your voice? How do you get someone to hear the rhythm of voice and words held together? To watch or listen to Kwame Alexander perform his fierce, beautiful, and important words is to want to hold them in your hands, to want to embrace their depth and meaning. Alexander perfectly takes the spoken word and delivers it to the page with poems that get straight to the heart.

If the daily, no, hourly news reports about unresolved racial tension and inequalities haven’t informed the world, then our call to attention are the poems of Dr. Martina McGowan. The succinct, sharp, and direct poems in I am The Rage require us to finally confront that which society ignores. Her words, along with the beautiful illustrations by Diana Ejaita, encourage us, no, command us to “wake up.” McGowan shouts from her heart to do so before it’s too late.

Author and poet Cleo Wade gifts her readers this collection of poems, mantras, and illustrations to remind us that we all have the power to show up and affect positive change. Building on the wisdom of her bestselling book Where to Begin: A Small Book About Your Power to Create Big Change will help you reflect on those small moments and actions that make up the big picture. And for the kiddos, check out What the Road Said.

Whether it’s personal or political, we need Nikki Giovanni’s beautiful and poetic voice. The poems and prose in Make Me Rain are sometimes dedicated to friends, family, or her literary peers. But in each one of them, we can hear her speaking to us, making the “big” in life easier to understand, putting us shoulder to shoulder with giants (our mothers, our friends, strangers), and letting us know she is here to embolden us.

In this third book of poetry in the What She Felt series, r.h. Sin writes poetry to heal the heart and mind the soul. r.h. Sin’s poems come from a place of empathy. His words give the courage to move forward. Like a best friend who is there for you at 2 AM, r.h. Sin’s book is the hand picking up the phone in the middle of the night.

Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation is an incredibly accessible work. It combines her poetry and essays that lend themselves to dialogue while reading the book AND after reading the book. Through photographs, illustrations, and side-by-side page notes, we can consider the weight of the subject matter. The intimacy and personal recollections of Rankine’s writing will open your eyes to the world around you. It’s a deft gesture that only a poet and scholar of Rankine’s ability could pull off.

Winner of the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award, The Tradition is a necessary collection of poetry, both broad and intimate, around fatherhood, legacy, blackness, queerness, worship, and trauma. “These astounding poems … don’t merely hold a lens up to the world and watch from a safe distance; they run or roll or stomp their way into what matters … This is one of the most luminous and courageous voices I have read in a long, long time.” —U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then Jasmine Mans moves from her heart to her pen to your heart. Womanhood, daughters, mothers, family, and neighbors all come together in Mans’ succinct and deeply sincere poems. And while her path is clear, sometimes it is the map (of society) that is complicated. We are fortunate to have Jasmine Mans as our navigator.
“Nothing short of sublime, and the territory [Mans’] explores…couldn’t be more necessary.” —Vogue

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” These words by the indelible Maya Angelou best sum up how her legacy, her works continue to inspire and uplift new generations. Angelou read her poem “On the Pulse of Morning” at the first inauguration of President Bill Clinton in 1993, making her only the second poet in history to read a poem at a Presidential Inauguration, and the first African American and woman to do so. Whether you have long admired her, or are looking for an introduction, this complete collection is an essential gift that honors the legendary poet and activist.