Tyehimba Jess Selected Works

With ambitious manipulations of poetic forms, Tyehimba Jess presents the sweat and story behind America’s blues, worksongs and church hymns. Part fact, part fiction, Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

A biography in poems, leadbelly examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a variety of intimate perspectives and using a range of innovative poetic forms. A collage of song, culture, and circumstance, alive and speaking.

An elegant addition to Citadel's enormously successful Pride series, this beautiful book celebrates the achievments of African-Americans from Colonial and Pre-Civil war America to today. Included are pioneers of Civil Rights; award-winning writers; brilliant inventors; incomprable singers and ground-breaking actors. Also, celebrates the great places and events that have become an integral part of American history.