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preface to the second edition

When Shadowed Dreams was first published in 1989, little informa- tion existed on women poets from the Harlem Renaissance despite their central role in creating that artistic movement. In the interven- ing seventeen years, important recovery work has occurred that ne- cessitates a major revision of this anthology, which remains the only one to focus exclusively on black women poets from the era. With new writers having come to light and new poetry by those I included in the first edition being uncovered in the course of my own and oth- ers’ research, the volume has been expanded to include eighteen new poets and a doubling of the original number of poems. In addition, I have expanded the original biographical sketches included in the first edition to cover the new information on these poets that has been excavated by Lorraine Elena Roses, Ruth Randolph, Cheryl Wall, Venetria Patton, and myself, as well as others. While the addition of this creative and biographical material ex- pands significantly our understanding of African American women writers participating in the New Negro Movement, I have also re- arranged the material to bring the poets more clearly into focus. Originally, I elected to organizeShadowed Dreams thematically in or- der to highlight the subjects common to this generation, but in this edition I have arranged the poetry by writer, introducing each with a biographical sketch, and put the writers in alphabetical order for easy reference. This schema allows us to see and hear more clearly the individual poetic voice of each woman so that we can better ap- preciate her artistic vision. Since I decided to abandon the thematic format of the original anthology, I took care to arrange each poet’s section in a thematic order that invites the reader to move meaning- fully from poem to poem. Each poet’s section begins with poetry that declares her artistic goal or defines her voice in some important way and then moves through pieces focused on heritage or New Negro militancy, love and nature poetry, and, finally, poems concerned with aging and death. Not every poet left us enough poems to cover all these topics, but those who did tell a story of birth, awakening, defiance, pain, joy, intimacy, and their imagined legacy. Although we now realize that women poets played a major role in

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the Harlem Renaissance and that their sensibility was more radical than we had thought, we have still to remove them from the shadows of literary history. When I ask people to name a woman poet from the era, I am generally confronted with silence. This needs to change, and I am hoping that by showcasing each poet in her own section and introducing her with a biographical sketch, she will acquire a stronger identity for contemporary readers. Gwendolyn Bennett, Mae Cowdery, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Helene John- son, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys May Casely Hayford (Aquah Laluah), Anne Spencer—these are names that should immediately spring to mind when we think of women poets from the Harlem Renaissance. As well, we need to get to know Anita Scott Coleman, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, Virginia Houston, Effie Lee Newsome, Esther Popel, and others whose poetry speaks to us over the decades with surprising force and richness. In rethinking Shadowed Dreams, I realized that another major is- sue was my original time frame for the Harlem Renaissance, which I have decided was too small (nearly all the poems from the first edi- tion were published in the 1920s). As we have revisioned the period, it has become clear that temporal and geographical expansion brings more women writers into the picture since many of them lived out- side of New York City and continued to publish in journals during the Great Depression. Just where one identifies the beginning and end of the Harlem Renaissance is, of course, open to debate, and valid disagreement over dates abounds; however, I see the writing during the period between the wars (1919–1941) as distinctly differ- ent from African American creative writing that came before or af- ter, so I have included poems that appeared in the late 1930s. Before World War I, we can detect traces of what would become hallmarks of work produced in the New Negro Movement—avoidance of a southern rural vernacular that had been ridiculed on the minstrel stage, portrayal of modern urban characters, identification with Af- rica, foregrounding of art as a political weapon, and militant resis- tance to racism—but the full flowering of these qualities would only occur after the war. Similarly, while the depression had a huge im- pact on black writers in various ways, poetry of the 1930s continues to reflect major themes of the Harlem Renaissance. African Ameri- can creative writing in this decade does exhibit an emerging urban 00-R3863-FM 6/20/06 2:40 PM Page xxiii

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realism that became a form of literary naturalism through the 1950s and beyond. This evolution mirrors the stark economic realities of a population largely disillusioned with the North and battered by mas- sive levels of unemployment and poverty, but writers continued to be influenced by the preceding decade in fundamental ways, and that shows up in women’s poetry. World War II would prove to be a de- fining event for black Americans; it profoundly altered their rhetoric and political thinking. The wartime Double Victory campaign fought by the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Col- ored People) and the National Urban League used the image of black people in uniform fighting for democracy abroad as a wedge against segregation on the home front, sparking the opening salvos of the Civil Rights Movement that would follow. Creative writers became increasingly blunt in their depiction of life as a black American and virtually abandoned the Harlem Renaissance idea that art could bring African Americans and whites together. I have kept the wonderful foreword by the late Nellie Y. McKay and my original introduction from the 1989 edition (with minor revision) as they frame the most important themes appearing in women’s poetry and lay out issues that continue to confront us today as we move forward with recovery of these lost texts. I have also re- tained most of the poetry that appeared in the first edition for pur- poses of continuity, eliminating only those writers whose small out- put or doubtful ethnicity did not seem to warrant their inclusion here. Although the poets appear in alphabetical order, this method of organization serendipitously yields a reading order that is aesthet- ically satisfying, given that many of the strongest poets appear at the beginning of the anthology. One final element I have added to the revised edition is origi- nal artwork from period journals and anthologies. The Harlem Re- naissance was artistically multidimensional—music and art were as much in the mix as literature—and these illustrations are meant to evoke a larger aesthetic context from which the poetry emerged. There are nine illustrations by Aaron Douglas, Gwendolyn Bennett, Laura Wheeler, Richard Bruce Nugent, Winold Reiss, and Lois Jones. All but Reiss are African American. These illustrations are paired with poems that speak to the artwork’s subject and visually animate it. I am hoping the illustrations in this anthology bring even more 00-R3863-FM 6/20/06 2:40 PM Page xxiv

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vividly to life the poetic voices that convey to us the dreams, hopes, pain, ecstasy, and anger of women who entered the twentieth cen- tury as modern women with new things to say. It is time we let the light of our attention fall on their words and hearts and bring them out of the shadows, where they have remained protected but invis- ible for decades. Their time is now.