Week 7: Black Arts Movement

Left to right: Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, Ishmael Reed, Gwendolyn Brooks

We want a black poem. And a
Black World.
Let the world be a Black Poem
And Let All Black People Speak This Poem
Silently
or LOUD

“Black Art” by Amiri Baraka

Tuesday, March 2

  • In class:
  • Assignment:
    • Read Black Arts Movement in Princeton Encyclopedia
    • Read intro and poetry by Ishmael Reed and Gwendolyn Brooks
    • Watch Nikki Giovanni’s Tedx Talk (link), respond to it in general here, and annotate “Ego Tripping” (link) by selecting excerpts and commenting on them. I encourage you to reply to your classmates’ comments, to the point of having a conversation around the poem.

Thursday, March 4

By Leonardo Flores

Professor Leonardo Flores is Chair of the English Department at Appalachian State University. He taught at the English Department at University of Puerto Rico: Mayagüez Campus from 1994 to 2019. He is President of the Electronic Literature Organization. He was the 2012-2013 Fulbright Scholar in Digital Culture at the University of Bergen in Norway. His research areas are electronic literature and its preservation via criticism, documentation, and digital archives. He is the creator of a scholarly blogging project titled I ♥ E-Poetry, co-editor of the Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3, and has a Spanish language e-lit column in 80 Grados. He is currently co-editing the first Anthology of Latin American Electronic Literature. For more information on his current work, visit leonardoflores.net.