In 2022, Hurston/Wright Foundation, in partnership with Brown Girl Book Lover, will present a short thematic book list with suggestions for the month. While we always encourage you to browse this website and check out all of the Legacy award-winning books, this list includes picks you may want to add to the list.
This week is the last week of April, National Poetry Month. We couldn’t let the month end without acknowledging some awesome poets you may want to make sure you check out:
1. Elizabeth Alexander
Elizabeth Alexander is a prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author, renowned poet, educator, scholar, and cultural advocate. She is also president of the Mellon Foundation, the nation’s largest funder in the arts, culture, and humanities. Among the fifteen books she has authored or co-authored, her poetry collection American Sublime was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 2006. Her memoir, The Light of the World, released in April, 2015 was a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award finalist, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Latest Book: The Trayvon Generation, 2022
Recommended Poem: “Manhattan Elegy”
2. Jericho Brown
Jericho Brown is author of The Tradition (Copper Canyon 2019), for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts, and he is the winner of the Whiting Award. Brown’s first book, Please (New Issues 2008), won the American Book Award. His second book, The New Testament (Copper Canyon 2014), won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. His third collection, The Tradition won the Paterson Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Latest Book: The Tradition, 2019
Recommended Poem: “Night Shift”
3. Nikky Finney
“So—you can write pretty,” Toni Cade Bambara tells the twenty-one-year-old Nikky Finney during a monthly writing circle that Bambara held in her Atlanta home during the 1980’s. “But what else can your words do besides adorn?” This flat-footed question, put to the young poet by the great short story writer, at the beginning of her career, sets her sailing towards a life of aiming her words to do more than pearl and decorate the page. Finney created a writing life rooted in empathetic engagement and human reciprocity. Nikky Finney was born by the sea in South Carolina and raised during the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Black Arts Movements. She is the author of On Wings Made of Gauze; Rice; The World Is Round; and Head Off & Split, which won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2011. Her new collection of poems, Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry, was released in 2020 from TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press.
Latest Book: Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry: Poems and Artifacts, 2020
Recommended Poem: “Left”
4. Yona Harvey
Yona Harvey is the author of the poetry collections You Don’t Have To Go To Mars for Love, which won the Believer Book Award for Poetry and Hemming the Water, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. She co-wrote with Roxane Gay Marvel’s World of Wakanda and co-wrote with Ta-Nehisi Coates Black Panther & the Crew. She has also worked with teenagers writing about mental health issues in collaboration with Creative Nonfiction magazine.
Latest Book: You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love, 2020
Recommended Poem: “Necessarily”
5. Nathaniel Mackey
Nathaniel Mackey was born in Miami, Florida, in 1947. He is the author of several books of fiction of “exquisite rhythmic lyricism” (Bookforum), poetry, and criticism and has received many awards for his work, including the National Book Award in poetry for Splay Anthem, the Stephen Henderson Award from the African American Literature and Culture Society, the Bollingen Prize, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Mackey is the Reynolds Price Professor of English at Duke University.
Latest Book: Breath and Precarity, 2021
Recommended Poem: “Ghost of a Trance”
6. Kamilah Aisha Moon
Kamilah Aisha Moon was from Nashville, Tennessee. She authored Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017) and She Has a Name (Four Way Books, 2013), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Poetry and the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle. Moon’s other honors included a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from Cave Canem, the Fine Arts Work Center, MacDowell, the Prague Summer Writing Institute, and the Vermont Studio Center. She worked as a poet in the schools, and taught poetry at Rikers Island and Medgar Evers College-CUNY in New York City. Moon passed away on September 24, 2021, leaving us with her beautiful poetic voice that still resonates vibrantly.
Last Book: Starshine & Clay (Four Way Books, 2017)
Recommended Poem: “Dressing Down”
7. Joy Priest
Joy Priest is the author of HORSEPOWER (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry from AWP. Her work has appeared in ESPN, Gulf Coast, Mississippi Review, and The Atlantic. She is currently a doctoral student in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of Houston.
Latest Book: Horsepower, 2020
Recommended Poem: “Nightsti”
8. Nicole Sealey
Nicole Sealey is the author of Ordinary Beast, finalist for the PEN Open Book and Hurston/Wright Legacy Awards, and The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize. Her honors include a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, the Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize from The American Poetry Review and a Poetry International Prize, as well as fellowships from the Bogliasco Foundation, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 2018 and 2021, The New Yorker, and the Paris Review. Nicole created The Sealey Challenge, where poetry lovers read one book of poems every day for the month of August.
Latest Book: Ordinary Beast, 2017
Favorite Poem: “And”