The 100 best African American poems: (*but I cheated)

The aunt / Mari Evans

For my people / Margaret Walker

Leroy / Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Ars poetica: Nov.7, 2008 / L. Lamar Wilson

Ka'ba / Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

When you have forgotten Sunday: the love story ; The sermon on the warpland ; We real cool / Gwendolyn Brooks

Jazz baby is it in you / Antoine Harris

"I fade into the night" / Adam Daniel

Old Lem / Sterling A. Brown / I am accused of tending to the past / Lucille Clifton

I am a black woman ; Who can be born black? / Mari Evans

Nikki-Rosa ; Knoxville, Tennessee / Nikki Giovanni

The dry spell / Kevin Young

Those winter Sundays ; Frederick Douglass / Robert Hayden

The Negro speaks of rivers / Langston Hughes

Choosing the blues / Angela Jackson

My father's love letters / Yusef Komunyakaa

The creation / James Weldon Johnson

A Negro love song / Paul Laurence Dunbar

Lift every voice and sing ; Go down death / James Weldon Johnson

Between ourselves / Audre Lorde

The union of two / Haki R. Madhubuti

Ballad of Birmingham / Dudley Randall

A poem to complement other poems / Haki R. Madhubuti

No images / Waring Cuney

Between the world and me / Richard Wright

Theme for English B ; Easy boogie ; Dream boogie ; Dream boogie (variation) ; Harlem ; Good morning ; Same in blues ; Island ; / Langston Hughes.

The blue Terrance / Terrance Hayes

The mother ; A Bronzeville mother loiters in Mississippi.Meanwhile, a Mississippi mother burns bacon ; The last quatrain of the ballad of Emmett Till ; A sunset of the city / Gwendolyn Brooks

Things I carried coming into the world ; Topography / Remica L. Bingham

Beneath me ; Autobiography / Jericho Brown

Parable of the sower / Pamela Sneed

Heritage ; Yet do I marvel ; Incident / Countee Cullen

We wear the mask / Paul Laurence Dunbar

Trifle ; The heart of a woman / Georgia Douglas Johnson

Woman with flower / Naomi Long Madgett

The idea of ancestry / Etheridge Knight

Don't say goodbye to the porkpie hat / Larry Neal

Cleaning / Camille T. Dungy

Boston year / Elizabeth Alexander

She wears red / Jackie Warren-Moore

Commercial break: road-runner, uneasy / Tim Seibles

Before making love / Toi Derricotte

Be-bop / Sterling Plumpp

Personal letter no. 3 ; Poem at thirty ; A poem for Sterling Brown / Sonia Sanchez

Marchers headed for Washington, Baltimore, 1963 / Remica L. Bingham

And yeah...this is a love poem / Nikki Giovanni

The carousel / Gloria C. Oden

Only everything I own / Patricia Smith

Lot's daughter dreams of her mother / Opal Moore

The girlfriend's train / Nikky Finney

Back from the arms of big mama / Afaa Michael Weaver

Mama's promise / Marilyn Nelson

Bop: a whistling woman / Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon.

Homage to my hips / Lucille Clifton

Train ride / Kwame Dawes

Train rides / Nikki Giovanni

A great granddaddy speaks / Lamont B. Steptoe

Eddie Priest's barbershop & notary / Kevin Young

View of the Library of Congress from Paul Laurence Dunbar High School / Thomas Sayers Ellis

Drapery factory, Gulfport, Mississippi, 1956 / Natash Trethewey

Some kind of crazy / Major Jackson

From / A. Van Jordan

Freedom candy / E. Ethelbert Miller

The Supremes / Cornelius Eady

Nikki save me / Michele Scott

"Nikki, if you were a song ..." / Kwame Alexander

Haiku / DJ Renegade

Untitled / Nadir Lasana Bomani

"I wish I could've seen it ..." / Leodis McCray

That and some mo' / DJ Renegade

Sometime in the summer there's October / Tony Medina

Dancing naked on the floor / Kwame Alexander

Harriet Tubman's email 2 master / Truth Thomas

A river that flows forever ; The rose that grew from concrete / Tupac Shakur

Rochelle / Reuben Jackson

All their stanzas look alike / Thomas Sayers Ellis

From the center 2 the edge ; The subtle art of breathing / Asha Bandele

Sounthern University, 1962 / Kevin Young

Poetry should ride the bus / Ruth Forman

Blues for spring / Colleen J. McElroy

The bicycle wizard / Sharan Strange

Bicycles / Nikki Giovanni

A clean slate / Fred D'Aguiar

Song through the wall / Akua Lezli Hope

A seat saved / Shana Yarborough

Sunday greens / Rita Dove

The untitled superhero poem / Tonya Maria Matthews

Mercy killing

Remica L. Bingham

If you saw a Negro lady / June Jordan

Ego tripping (there may be a reason why) / Nikki Giovanni.