Black History Literary Highlights

The Poetry Foundation is running a feature on Poems to Celebrate Black History Month that includes selections by some of today’s foremost poets. Featured works include “Letter to Brooks: Spring Garden,” by Major Jackson and “Praise Song for the  Day,” by Elizabeth Alexander.

Here’s an excerpt from “For you: anthophilous, lover of flowers,” by Reginald Dwayne Betts:

All this a way to dream green rose petals on the bed you love;

petrophilous, stigmatophilia: live near rocks, tattoo hurt;

for you topophilia: what place do you love? All these words

for love (for you), all these ways to say believe

in symphily, to say let us live near each other.

About Post Author

Lauren Alwan

Lauren Alwan’s fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Southern Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, StoryQuarterly, in the Bellevue Literary Review as the recipient of the 2016 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction, and elsewhere. Her essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, The Rumpus, The Millions, The Northwest Review of Books, Writer’s Digest, among others, and listed as notable in Best American Essays 2016. She is a prose editor at the museum of americana, an online literary review. Follow her on Twitter at @lauren_alwan and learn more at www.laurenalwan.com

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