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BLACK LIVES MATTER

June Jordan, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” (poem)
Reginald Dwayne Betts “When I Think of Tamir Rice While Driving” (poem)
“Running for Your Life: A Community Poem for Ahmaud Arbery” from NPR
Danez Smith, “not an elegy for Mike Brown” (poem)
Black Lives Matter Collection from the Academy of American Poets
Black Lives Matter Collection at Literary Hub

 

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BORDERS & BELONGING

Mahmoud Darwish “I Belong There” (poem)
Sun Yung Shin, “Immigrant Song” (poem)
Choi Jin-Young, “Dori and Jina” (short story)
Jhumpa Lahiri, “The Boundary” (short story)
Viet Thanh Nguyen, “The War Years” (short story)
Bernard Malamud, “The Refugee” (short story)
Li Young Lee, “Immigrant Blues” (poem)
David Hernandez, “All-American” (poem)
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Mediterranean Blue” (poem)

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IDENTITY & JUSTICE

June Jordan, “Poem About My Rights” (poem)
Yiyun Li, “A Flawless Silence” (short story)
James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues” (short story)
Diane Wakoski, “Dancing on the Grave of a Son of a Bitch” (poem)
Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Children of the Poor” (poem)
James Weldon Johnson, Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912, novel)
Tony Kushner, Angles in America (play)

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LOVE, SEX, & SEXUALITY

Collection: Queer Love Poems (from the Poetry Foundation)
Langston Hughes, “Desire” (poem)
Mary Gaitskill, “Tiny Smiling Daddy” (short story)
John Donne, “The Flea” (poem)
Adrienne Rich, “The Floating Poem” from Twenty-One Love Poems (poem)
Calvin Gimpelevitch, “You Wouldn’t Have Known About Me” (short story)
Craig Santos Perez, “Love in a Time of Covid-19” (poem)
Miller Oberman, “On Trans” (poem)
Jill McDonough,“Dear Gaybashers” (poem)
Bryan Washington, “Remember This: Love Is a Verb” (short story)
Allen Ginsberg, “Howl” (poem)
Francisco Aragon, “City Moon” (poem)
Audre Lorde, “The Black Unicorn” (audio only)
Chen Chen, “Summer” (poem)
Sappho “The Anactoria Poem” (poem, 7th Century BCE)
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1867, poetry collection, The Walt Whitman Archive

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TRUTH & STORYTELLING

Alice Sola Kim, “Now Wait for this Week” (short story)
Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant–“ (poem)
Bryan Washington, “The Visitor” (short story)
August Wilson, Fences (play)
Naomi Shihab Nye, “Truth Serum” (poem)
Ari Tison, “The Storyteller Gets Her Name” (poem)

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CAPTIVITY & ENSLAVEMENT

Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861, autobiographical novel)
Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (1831, autobiography)
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African (1789, autobiography)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845, autobiography)
Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Sympathy” (poem, 1899)
James Monroe Whitfield, “How Long?” (poem, 1853)
Nat Turner, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1831, transcription by prison clerk)