African American Poetry: From Phillis Wheatley to Amanda Gorman
Quick answer: African American poetry from Phillis Wheatley to Amanda Gorman: the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, new forms, and the poets who built a canon.
In 1773 a young enslaved woman in Boston published a book of poems, and eighteen white men signed a document attesting she had really written it. Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral opens the African American poetic tradition with a fact that still stings: the first task of the Black poet in America was proving the right to exist on the page.
From that beginning grew one of the most inventive bodies of poetry in any language, a two hundred and fifty year conversation running through the Harlem Renaissance, the Black Arts Movement, and a remarkable present in which African American poets have invented some of the few genuinely new forms in modern verse.
Founding voices
After Wheatley came George Moses Horton, who composed poems while enslaved in North Carolina and sold love lyrics to university students, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, whose antislavery poems reached huge audiences. At the century's end Paul Laurence Dunbar became nationally famous writing in both dialect and standard English; his poem about the mask that grins and lies remains one of the most quoted statements of double consciousness in American literature.
Renaissance to Black Arts
The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s made Black poetry a modern movement. Langston Hughes folded blues structure into the lyric, Claude McKay loaded the Shakespearean sonnet with protest, Countee Cullen brought classical polish, and Georgia Douglas Johnson held the salon where much of it was argued out. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first Black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize, for Annie Allen, and her portraits of Bronzeville set a standard for exactness that poets still study.
The Black Arts Movement of the 1960s, driven by Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Haki Madhubuti, pulled poetry toward performance, politics, and Black audiences directly, while Audre Lorde and Maya Angelou widened the tradition's registers of witness and survival.
The craft: forms this tradition invented
Few traditions have coined new forms so recently. Hughes built the blues poem on the AAB pattern of the music. Terrance Hayes invented the golden shovel, in which the end words of your poem, read downward, spell out a line by Gwendolyn Brooks or another poet. Jericho Brown devised the duplex, a fourteen line braid of couplets that splices sonnet, ghazal, and blues. Claudia Rankine's Citizen stretched the lyric into documentary prose.
The lesson for any poet is that form is not a museum. If the inherited shapes will not hold your material, you are allowed to build one that will.
The tradition today
Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, and Tracy K. Smith have each served as United States poet laureate, and Cave Canem, founded in 1996 by Toi Derricotte and Cornelius Eady, has trained a generation of Black poets including many of the most decorated names now writing. When Amanda Gorman recited The Hill We Climb at the 2021 presidential inauguration, she stood in a line that runs straight back to Wheatley, and the world watched a tradition claim the country's biggest stage.
What poets can take from this
- Write a golden shovel: take one line you love, place its words in order as your line endings, and write toward them.
- Study Hughes's blues poems, then draft one using the pattern of statement, varied repeat, and punchline turn.
- Read Brooks's Bronzeville portraits for economy: every detail is doing character work.
- Try loading a strict inherited form, like McKay's sonnets, with material the form was never built to hold.
- Trace one image through Wheatley, Dunbar, and Gorman to feel how a tradition talks to itself across centuries.
Try it yourself
Choose a single line from any poet in this tradition and write a golden shovel from it, letting your poem answer or argue with the line hidden down its margin.
Questions
Who was the first published African American poet?
Phillis Wheatley, whose Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in 1773 while she was enslaved in Boston. She was the first African American author of a published book of poetry.
What is the golden shovel form?
A form invented by Terrance Hayes in tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks. You take a line from an existing poem and use each of its words, in order, as the end words of your own lines, so the borrowed line reads down the right hand margin.
What was the Black Arts Movement?
A 1960s and 1970s movement led by writers such as Amiri Baraka, Sonia Sanchez, and Nikki Giovanni that tied poetry to Black political consciousness and performance. It championed work made for Black audiences and reshaped American poetry's sense of purpose.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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