Bøger af Quraysh Ali Lansana

These poems trace the journeys of the great Black historical figure Harriet Tubman and her fugitives through the backwoods of America.

The year is 1921, and Opal Brown would like to show you around her beautiful neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Filled with busy stores and happy families, Opal also wants you to know that "everyone looks like me." In both words and illustrations, this carefully researched and historically accurate book allows children to experience the joys and success of Greenwood, one of the most prosperous Black communities of the early 20th century, an area Booker T. Washington dubbed America's Black Wall Street. Soon after the day narrated by Opal, Greenwood would be lost in the Tulsa Race Massacre, the worst act of racial violence in American history.

"Quraysh Ali Lansana is from Enid, OK. Christopher Stewart was raised in Dallas, small Texas towns, and Chicago neighborhoods. A white man and a black man born in post-Kennedy, post-King southern and midwestern USA--though both disagree with those geographical tags. Through these poems, the poets assert that their births, their ways of seeing, and their pains are rooted in what Ali Lansana's OU film professor termed 'the Walmart republic, ' a land where shopping center is community center"--Publisher marketing.

"e;[A] superb tribute . . . [an] essential collection"e; of essays analyzing the works of the preeminent twentieth-century poet and voice of social justice (Booklist).Winner of the Central New York Book Award for NonfictionFinalist for the Chicago Review of Books AwardPoet, educator, and social activist Gwendolyn Brooks was a singular force in American culture.The first black woman to be named United States poet laureate, Brook's poetry, fiction, and social commentary shed light on the beauty of humanity, the distinct qualities of black life and community, and the destructive effects of racism, sexism, and class inequality.A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks' oeuvre-on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator."e;Gwendolyn Brooks wrote and performed her magnificent poetry for and about the Black people of Chicago, and yet it was also read with anguish, delight, and awe by white people, successive waves of immigrants, and ultimately the world."e; -Bill Ayers, from the Introduction

A 2020 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner.Traversing twenty-three years of earth and breath, Quraysh Ali Lansana's first new and collected poems roadmaps small town Oklahoma to southside Chicago in compelling poems that question, surprise and dare. As a direct descendent of the Black Arts Movement and last student of Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, Lansana explores the complicated internal and external terrain of Blackness and history from a post-King, post-Kennedy childhood through the election of the first non-White president, while grappling with the definition of home. These are poems that cry, sing, scream and see.

Lansana uses his words to talk about the everyday life of a Black Chicagoan.