Minor Notes // Volume 1

The first volume in an anthology series that amplifies the voices of unsung Black poets to paint a more robust picture of our national past, and of the Black literary imagination, with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith

A Penguin Classic

Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy repeatedly found themselves struck by the number of exciting poets they came across in long-out-of-print collections and forgotten journals whose work has been neglected or entirely ignored, even by scholars of Black poetry.Minor Notesis an excavation initiative that recovers and curates archival materials from these understudied, though supremely gifted, African American poets of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and aims to bridge scholarly interest with the growing general audience who reads, writes, and circulates poetry within that tradition. AsMinor Notesclarifies, the work of contemporary Black poets is perhapsbestunderstood through the lens of a long-standing tradition of the poet as witness, as prophetic voice, as communal bard, and as scholar of the everyday and the miraculous. The poets featured in Volume 1 are George Moses Horton, Fenton Johnson, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Henrietta Cordelia Ray, David Wadsworth Cannon Jr., Anne Spencer, and Angelina Weld Grimk.

Joshua Bennettis a Professor of English and Creative Writing at Dartmouth College. He is the author:The Sobbing School(Penguin, 2016) a finalist for an NAACP Image Award,Property Once Myself(Harvard, 2020) andOwed(Penguin, 2020). He received the 2021 Whiting Award for Poetry and Nonfiction. His first work of narrative nonfiction,Spoken Word: A Cultural History, is forthcoming from Knopf in 2023.

Jesse McCarthyis assistant professor of English and African and African American studies at Harvard University. He is an editor at thePointand has written forn+1,Dissent, theNation, and theNew Republic. His critically acclaimed essay collectionWho Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?(Liveright 2021) was a NYT Editor’s Choice.

• Publisher:Penguin Classics (April 11, 2023)
• Language:English
• Paperback:208 pages
• ISBN-10:0143137263
• ISBN-13:9780143137269
• Item Weight:7.1 ounces
• Dimensions:5.06 x 0.56 x 7.7 inches