Back in the day, there was a heckuva party, a jam, for a word-making man. The King of Letters. Langston Hughes. His ABCs became drums, bumping jumping thumping like a heart the size of the whole country. They sent some people yelling and others, his word-children, to write their own glory.--Amazon.com

"This biography explores the life of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), a major nineteenth-century American poet and one of the first African American writers to garner international attention and praise in the wake of emancipation. While Dunbar is perhaps best known for poems such as "Sympathy" (a poem that ends "I know why the caged bird sings!") and "We Wear the Mask," he wrote prolifically in many genres, including a newspaper he produced with...

"Persona writing, a method of borrowing the voice and temperament of accomplished writers, offers aspiring writers imaginative distance and perspective needed to tell their stories. Through a candid and generous account of his own story, acclaimed poet Philip Schultz reveals how his early struggle to find inspiration in his negative inclinations led to the idea of persona writing, the philosophy on which he founded the Writers Studio in 1987. Schultz...

"Emily Dickinson is revered as one of America's greatest and most original poets. Quiet Fire presents the life and art of Dickinson through the poet's own letters and poems"-- Dickinson went from an unrecognized hobby writer to one of the faces of US poetry in the span of a generation. Virtually unknown before her death, she reshaped American ideas of what poems could be-- but not without personal cost. Dommermuth-Costa traces on Dickinson's life,...

"We live in unsettled times. What is America and who are we as a people? How do we understand the dreams and betrayals that have shaped the American experience? For poet and critic Edward Hirsch, poetry opens up new ways of answering these questions, of reconnecting with one another and with what's best in us. In this landmark new book from Library of America, Hirsch offers deeply personal readings of forty essential American poems we thought we knew--from...

...this writing thing was some kind of magic trick I didn't yet understand... Nikki Grimes discovered the power of writing at the tender age of six, when, alone in her room, she poured her fears, anger, and tears onto a piece of paper - and felt sweet relief. Words and faith were her most enduring companions as life flung her headlong from one harrowing experience to the next through her childhood and teenage years. Words, spilled into notebook after...

"The second volume of Robert Crawford's definitive biography records the untold story of T. S. Eliot's adult life, from his relationship with Emily Hale to his momentous later works"--

"One of the founding fathers of multicultural studies, Ishmael Reed first came to the attention of the literary world as a poet. Despite success as a novelist, playwright, essayist, and recording artist, he has never ceased to write poetry, delving into waters spiritual and political with his own unexpected and uniquely powerful voice. New and Collected Poems, 1964-2006 captures four decades of Reed's inimitable vision, an ongoing journey from New...

An aspiring poet joins a cynical team of journalists in nineteenth-century Paris. When he agrees to write rave reviews for bribes, achieving material success at the expense of his conscience, and soon discovers that the written word can be an instrument of both beauty and deceit in this sumptuous adaptation of Honore de Balzac's epic novel, Lost Illusions.