Mahogany L Browne

"Boldly lyrical and fiercely honest, Mahogany L. Browne's Chrome Valley offers an intricate portrait of Black womanhood in America. "We praise their names / & the hands that write / Praise the mouth that speaks," she writes in tribute to those who came before her. Browne captures a quintessential girlhood through the pleasures and pangs of young love: the thrill of skating hip to hip at the roller rink, the heat of holding hands in the dark, and,...

Picked on at home, criticized for talking trash while beating boys at basketball, and always seen as less than her best friend, a girl struggles to like and accept herself.

"The first complete collection of Wanda Coleman's original and inventive sonnets. Long regarded as among her finest work, these one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom. "Fantastically entertaining and deeplyengaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit."-Washington Post "Terrifying and fearlessly inventive."-New York Times Wanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black...

Featuring contributions from an award-winning, bestselling group of Black voices, past and present, this powerful poetry anthology elicits vital conversations about race, belonging, history and faith to highlight Black joy and pain.