The Literary Navigator Device

A brief take on the Literary Navigator, a digital platform offering personalized recommendations across Black literature—connecting novels, poems, essays, and comics for curious readers.

------------ 

Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions

Blogging about Poetry in September 2025

[Related content: Blogging about Poetry]

• September 29: Anthologizing Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks

• September 17: Anthologizing Langston Hughes 

• September 1: Blogging about Poetry in August 2025

Anthologizing Margaret Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks

Across the twentieth century, few poems by African American writers have been anthologized as frequently as Margaret Walker’s “For My People” and Gwendolyn Brooks’s “We Real Cool.” These two powerful compositions became signature poems for their authors and staples in literature collections and classrooms. 

In November 1937, Poetry magazine published “For My People” by a 22-year-old poet named Margaret Walker. The poem gave voice to the pain, strength, and resilience of African Americans, or as Walker wrote, “my people.” It became her signature piece and a defining work of her literary career.

Five years later, in 1942, Walker’s collection For My People won the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets. The title poem stood out as the most recognizable work in the volume. Its themes of collective struggle and hope resonated across generations.

Walker’s national profile expanded when she appeared on the 1954 Anthology of Negro Poetry album, alongside Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others. Her reading of “For My People” gave the poem an added dimension through her own powerful voice. This audio exposure helped solidify the poem’s cultural importance.

From the late 1960s through the 1970s, editors of African American literature anthologies repeatedly selected “For My People.” Between 1967 and 1974 alone, the poem was featured in over 20 different collections. It quickly became one of the most frequently anthologized poems in Black literary history.

In 1975, the Smithsonian released The Poetry of Margaret Walker, a full album of her readings. Again, “For My People” took center stage. As Walker later remarked, the poem became so iconic that saying it was akin to saying her name.

Similarly, in September 1959, Poetry magazine published “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks, then 42 years old. The short, striking poem captured the boldness and vulnerability of young Black boys chilling at a pool hall. Told in their collective voice, this persona poem became an enduring cultural touchstone.

By then, Brooks had already won the Pulitzer Prize and published several books. Yet “We Real Cool” would become her most anthologized and widely taught poem. Like Walker’s signature piece, it found a home in dozens of literature collections over the decades.

Although Brooks appreciated the poem’s popularity, she expressed concern that it overshadowed the breadth of her body of work. She noted that readers often focused on “We Real Cool” while overlooking her many other rich and complex poems. Nonetheless, the repeated anthologizing of the poem ensured its place in the canon—and reaffirmed the power of a short, resonant piece to shape a poet’s legacy.

Audiences most often come to know these two powerful poets, Walker and Brooks, through their most published poems. For readers of African American literature who are hungry for more African American literature, “For My People” and “We Real Cool” have also often been the door into these poets’ worlds, a starting point and a portal to their extensive creative works.

Sheree Renée Thomas and Suyi Davies Okungbowa at the New York Black and African Literature Festival

We somehow managed to pull off an unlikely, yet long overdue, conversation between an African American author who novelized a comic book about Wakanda and a Nigerian author who novelized a comic book about the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda. This exchange took place at the New York Black and African Literature Festival in New York City. 

On September 7, I moderated a conversation between Sheree Renée Thomas, author of Black Panther: Panther's Rage (2025) and Suyi Davies Okungbowa who wrote Marvel: Black Panther: The Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda (2025). Both writers also contributed to Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda (2022), edited by Jesse J. Holland.

I’m especially grateful to Efe Paul-Azino, the festival’s director, for making this conversation possible by inviting Thomas and Okungbowa. I had suggested to him that Black Panther represents a vital site of African American and African creativity and aesthetics. I floated the idea of a panel and panelists in a hopeful, open-ended way, citing the recent novelizations of Black Panther comics as a model. I was pleased when he secured commitments from both authors.

Our discussion covered wide-ranging territory. We explored how each writer incorporated cultural signifiers into their work and how they extended and reimagined aspects of the Black Panther storylines. They spoke openly about the experience of working on a Marvel property.

They also reflected on their career trajectories and highlighted a range of speculative writers across the Black diaspora, situating their own contributions within a much larger continuum of creativity.

The conversation flowed so well that at one point I asked why we haven’t seen more of these exchanges such as African American and Nigerian authors discussing the intersections of their work in public forums.

They cited a range of challenges, including language, geography, cultural distance, and more. Yet gatherings like this festival show that we have genuine opportunities to bring seemingly far-flung people and ideas together.

Related:

• Notes on the New York Black and African Literature Festival

Notes on the New York Black and African Literature Festival

On September 7, I participated in a panel for The New York Black and African Literature Festival (Sept. 5 - 7) in New York City. The festival, which promoted the idea of "radical solidarities," included three days of bringing together writers and artists across Africa and the global diaspora. 

The festival is a great idea. 

The festival was directed by Efe Paul-Azino and facilitated by his team of contributors and volunteers. In a mission statement, he wrote that "As the uneven distribution of the benefits and burdens of globalization continues to have a disproportionately negative effect on black communities worldwide, the need and promise of pan-diasporic cooperation become even more relevant."

Paul-Azino went on to note that "The festival’s key objectives remain to: build bridges between communities, amplify movements for justice, create new frameworks for understanding our shared challenges and aspirations, and strengthen networks of support and exchange."

I imagine this gathering wasn't the first of its kind, but it was an important model for what's possible moving forward. It also signaled what kinds of conversations and activities we might build on.  

Related:

• Sheree Renée Thomas, Suyi Davies Okungbowa at the New York Black and African Literature Festival

Anthologizing Langston Hughes

Anthologies play a major role in shaping how we understand literature, especially when it comes to Black writers. Editors decide which works, and which authors, get included, reprinted, and taught. Langston Hughes stands out as the most anthologized Black writer of the 20th and early 21st centuries, offering a clear lens into how literary legacy is created and maintained.

Hughes’s work has appeared in over 200 African American literature anthologies, with editors reprinting his poems, essays, short stories, and plays across every decade since the 1920s. Few writers, Black or otherwise, have been included so frequently or across so many genres. His editorial visibility sets him apart from his Harlem Renaissance peers and from most other Black literary figures.

We compiled a dataset of 268 anthologies containing Hughes’s work, which included 425 unique compositions. Nearly 80% of those selections were poems, but editors also chose dozens of his short stories, essays, and autobiographical writings. These numbers reflect continual interest in the range and reach of Hughes’s literary output.

Compared to other widely respected Black poets like Gwendolyn Brooks, Amiri Baraka, and Phillis Wheatley, Hughes appears far more frequently and consistently. This shows that even within the category of "most anthologized," there are levels, what we might call visibility disparity. Anthology inclusion doesn’t just reflect fame; it helps produce it.

A major factor in Hughes’s anthology success is the widespread reprinting of “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” often treated as his signature poem. First published when he was just 18, it appears in more than 80 anthologies. While that early poem opened doors for Hughes, its dominance has, in some ways, narrowed how his larger body of work is remembered.

This pattern, of one poem defining an author, extends to others like Brooks, Baraka, and Margaret Walker. Signature poems help secure a writer’s place in literary history, but they can also freeze a poet in a single moment, limiting how later or lesser-known works are received. Anthologies often perpetuate this pattern by spotlighting the same poem over and over again.

Hughes is one of the few Black writers who regularly appears in predominantly white anthologies, though usually in a more limited way. In African American collections, he’s represented as a multi-genre writer; in white anthologies, he’s primarily presented as a poet. Still, his inclusion in both spaces has helped keep his name and work in constant circulation.

Even though Hughes appears in more anthologies than any other Black writer, he hasn’t received the same level of deep scholarly attention as peers like Richard Wright or Toni Morrison. That reveals a key paradox: a writer can be everywhere on reading lists but still be underexamined in academic discourse. Anthologizing Hughes involves more than selecting his work for publication. Instead, it also reveals how editors, educators, and institutions influence what gets remembered, studied, and celebrated.

How book recommendations at a barbershop led to an online network to find Black literature

From STL PR 

Inspired by barbershop chats and a brotherly contest over hip-hop facts, the Black Lit Network is a digital resource designed to make African American literature more widely accessible. Southern Illinois University Edwardsville professor Howard Rambsy II co-leads the project. He discusses how a recent $1.6 million grant to SIUE for the project will boost its reach and impact. He also speaks to the significance of investing in efforts to amplify African American writers, works, and ideas – especially through a public higher education institution in the Midwest, and the larger St. Louis region.

Related:

• Black Lit Network

Zora Neale Hurston’s Short Stories of Love and Betrayal

A brief take on how Zora Neale Hurston’s short stories use infidelity and community gossip to transform private conflicts into public spectacles, blending humor and tension to depict Southern Black life.

Script by Kenton Rambsy

Related:

• Episodes of Remarkable Receptions