This important book collects a wide range of fiction and poetry that first appeared in the pages of Callaloo, the premier literary journal devoted to African-diaspora literature and to Black literary and cultural studies. Founded twenty-five years ago—and still edited—by Charles Henry Rowell (Texas A&M University, College Station), Callaloo is both national and international in terms of scope and readership. It is also, as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., observed, "without doubt, the most elegantly edited journal of African and African-American literature [of] today." This anthology, ideally suited for all readers studying modern Black literature, includes the work of Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Lucille Clifton, Terry McMillan, Ai, Nathaniel Mackey, John Edgar Wideman, Michael S. Harper, Charles Johnson, Thylias Moss, and many other disntinguished authors.

Charles Henry Rowell is the editor and founder of Callaloo and a professor of English at Texas A&M University (College Station). His poems, interviews, and scholarly articles have appeared in a variety of periodicals, including The Southern Review and Agni. He is the editor of Ancestral House: The Black Short Story in the Americas and Europe (1995) and coeditor (with Bruce Morrow) of Shade: An Anthology of Fiction by Gay Men of African Descent (1996). He lives in Bryan, Texas.

Acknowledgments

Foreword by Percival Everett

Introduction by Charles Rowell

Fiction

Almanzar, Jose Alcantara — "My Singular Irene"

Butler, Octavia — "The Evening and the Morning and the Night"

Condé, Maryse — "The Breadnut and the Breadfruit"

Danticat, Edwidge — from The Journals of the Water Days 1986

Delaney, Samuel R. — from Shoat Rumblin'

Ellison, Ralph — "Cadillac Flambé"

Everett, Percival — "Meiosis"

Forrest, Leon — "Sugar Groove"

Glave, Thomas — "Whose Song?"

Harris, Wilson — from Jonestown

Johnson, Charles — "The Sorcerer's Apprentice"

Jones, Gayl — from The Machete Woman

Kenan, Randall — "Now Why Come That Is"

Lee, Helen Elaine — "Silences"

Mackey, Nathaniel — "Atet A. D."

McCluskey, Jr., John — from The River People

McMillan, Terry — "Ma Dear"

Phillips, Caryl — from Cambridge

Wideman, John Edgar — "Ascent by Balloon from the Yard of Chestnut Street Jail"

Poetry

Ai — "Blue Suede Shoes"

Alexander, Elizabeth — "The Venus Hottentot"

Barrax, Gerald W. — "All My Live Ones" & "An Audience of One"

Braithwaite, Kamau Edward — from "Clips"

Cassells, Cyrus — "Sally Hemmings to Thomas Jefferson"

Césaire, Aimé — "The Automatic Crystal," "Your Portrait," & "Wifredo Lam. ."

Clifton, Lucille — "The Times" & "Lazarus"

Derricotte, Toi — "The Promise" & "Holy Cross Hospital"

Dixon, Melvin — "Heartbeats" & "Climbing Montmartre"

Dove, Rita — "Straw Hat," "Motherhood," "Headdress," & "Heroes"

Edwards, Brent Hayes — "Middle Ear Recitation"

Ellis, Thomas Sayers — "Fatal April" & "Kiss in the Dark"

Etienne, Phebus — "A Ride to the Wedding" & "Shoes"

Hamer, Forrest — "Goldsboro Narratives"

0Harper, Michael S. — "Modulations on a Theme: For Josephus Long"

Harris, Claire — "Mysteries" & "Framed"

Jackson, Angela — "The Love of Travelers"

Jackson, Major — "Some Kind of Crazy" & "Don Pullen at the Zanzibar"

Jackson, Reuben — "Frank"

Komunyakaa, Yusef — "Venus Flytraps," "Red Pagoda," "Birds on a Powerline," & "Slam, Dunk & Hook"

Lorde, Audre — "Fishing in White Water" & "Jesehelms"

Major, Clarence — "Difficulty of Perspective" & "Unwanted Memory"

Mitchell, Karen — "Country After Country" & "Forgiveness"

Morejon, Nancy — "Richard Brought His Flute"

Moss, Thylias — "Holding" and "One for Newborns"

Mullen, Harryette — "Unspoken" & "Fable"

Osbey, Brenda Marie — "Setting Loose the Icons"

Pereira, Edimilson de Almeida — "Calunga Lungara"

Phillips, Carl — "Moving Target" & "The Clearing"

Roberson, Ed — "Elegy for a White Cock"

Roy, Lucinda H. — "Book Review"

Sanchez, Sonia — "A Poem for My Father" & "Sequences"

Strange, Sharan — "Childhood" & "Offering"

Trethewey, Natasha — "Letter Home" & "Vignette"

Walker, Alice — "On Stripping Bark from Myself"

Welburn, Ron — "Yellow Wolf Spirit" & "A Moon Accountability"

Wright, Jay — "Naming the Asturian Bird" & "The Economy of Power"

Young, Kevin — "The Escape Artist" & "Cassius Clay by Basquiat"

Afterword by Carl Phillips