Black Poetry after the Black Arts Movement is a fifteen-month program funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that responds to the resurgence of interest in contemporary poetry, its expanded production and wide circulation. Black Poetry continues the work that was undertaken by Don’t Deny My Voice: Reading and Teaching African American Poetry during 2013-14 by giving more focused attention to a reassessment of African American poetry during the last fifty years, from 1960 to the present.

Special attention will be paid to the divergent and yet cross-fertilizing trajectories of black poetry since the 1980s, which has produced both the sharp and vocal critiques of spoken word poetry and the refined academic poetry that garners so much critical attention from the literary establishment.