The Great Poems by African American Writers

African American literature is the body of literature produced in the United States by writers of African descent. It begins with the works of such late 18th-century writers as Phillis Wheatley. Before the high point of enslaved people narratives, African-American literature was dominated by autobiographical spiritual narratives. The genre known as slave narratives in the 19th century were accounts by people who had generally escaped from slavery, about their journeys to freedom and ways they claimed their lives. The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s was a great period of flowering in literature and the arts, influenced both by writers who came North in the Great Migration and those who were immigrants from Jamaica and other Caribbean islands.
 
Phillis Wheatley
To the Right Honourable William, Earl of Dartmouth
On Virtue
An Hymn To the Morning
An Hymn To the Evening
 
Frances E. W. Harper
Bury Me in a Free Land
Songs for the People
My Mother's Kiss
A Grain of Sand
Our Hero
The Sparrow's Fall
 
James Weldon Johnson
Sence You Went Away
 
Paul Laurence Dunbar
The Lesson
Sympathy
We Wear the Mask
 
Claude McKay
After the Winter
If We Must Die
The Tropics in New York
 
Countee Cullen
For Paul Laurence Dunbar
Incident
Langston Hughes
The Weary Blues
Jazzonia
Negro Dancers
The Cat And The Saxophone (2 A. M.)
Young Singer
Cabaret
To Midnight Nan At Leroy'S
To A Little Lover-Lass, Dead
Harlem Night Club
Nude Young Dancer
Young Prostitute
To A Black Dancer In "The Little Savoy"
Song For A Banjo Dance
Blues Fantasy
Lenox Avenue: Midnight