Minor Notes, Volume 1

Georgia Douglas Johnson, George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson

ISBN 10: 0143137263 / ISBN 13: 9780143137269

Published by Penguin Books Ltd, GB, 2023

About this Item

Minor Notes Vol. 1 features the work of three poets. Published in 1837, Poems by a Slave is one of the lesser-known works by George Moses Horton (1798-1883), once popularly known as the 'black bard of North Carolina.' Visions of the Dusk (1915) is an American prose poem known for its formal innovation by Fenton Johnson, a poet, essayist, editor and educator from Chicago. Georgia Douglas Johnson was the most widely read black woman poet in the US during the first three decades of the 20th century. Bronze: A Book of Verse (1922) was introduced with a foreword by W. E. B. Du Bois.

Seller Inventory # LU-9780143137269

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Minor Notes, Volume 1
• Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd, GB
• Publication Date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0143137263
• ISBN 13: 9780143137269
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Dimensions: 5.06W x 0.56H x 7.7D inches 5.06 inches width by 0.56 inches height by 7.7 inches depth
• Weight: 200 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith

A Penguin Classic

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry. Minor Notes is an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. As Minor Notes clarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhaps best understood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimké.

About the Author

Joshua Bennett is a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author: The Sobbing School (Penguin, 2016) a finalist for an NAACP Image Award, Property Once Myself (Harvard, 2020) and Owed (Penguin, 2020). He received the 2021 Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction. His first work of narrative nonfiction, Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2023.
 
Jesse McCarthy is assistant professor of English and African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is an editor at the Point and has written for n+1, Dissent, the Nation, and the New Republic. His critically acclaimed essay collection Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (Liveright 2021) was a NYT Editor’s Choice.