Agee, James and Walker Evans.
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1941.
An eloquent and disturbing documentary of Southern sharecroppers in the ‘30’s made up of narrative and photographs that capture the daily lives of three families eking out subsistence on tenant farms. The intimacy and humility orchestrated in this almost 500 page volume is the result of Agee and Evans living with these families over a period of months.
Collins, Billy.
The Apple That Astonished Paris.
Fayetteville: The University of Arkansas Press, 1988.
Very readable and accessible poems that often deal with every day life and yet catch the humanity and soul of what
could
be the mundane.
Gates Jr., Henry Louis, Nellie Y. McKay, Eds.
The Norton Anthology of African
American Literature.
New York: W.W. Norton & Company, l997.
A massive representation of all genres of African American literature dating from 1746 to the present, including several complete works such as Toni Morrison’s
Sula
and August Wilson’s play
Fences.
Kunitz, Stanley.
Passing Through
:
The Later Poems, New and Selected. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995.
Now in his nineties, Kunitz publishes his ninth volume of poetry, poignant and humble. There is a line in his poem
Passing Through
: “I am changing to a word.” He has!
Lawrence, Jacob.
Harriet and the Promised Land.
Hong Kong: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1997.
Lawrence’s stunning narrative paintings, including his rendition of her story in verse, documenting Harriet Tubman’s heroic rescue of slaves, herself a slave, risking her life with every trip from the South to the North.
Minnesota Humanities Commission.
Braided Lives: An Anthology of Multicultural
American Writing.
St. Paul: Minnesota Humanities Commission, 1991.
An anthology of Native American, Hispanic American, African American, and Asian American prose, poetry and drama.
Nesbitt, Peter T. and Michelle Dubois.
Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob
Lawrence
. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000.
This volume, containing reproductions of many of the over 900 paintings by Lawrence, also contains eight essays about Lawrence, his life and his work. There is, in this volume, a reproduction of
Confrontation at the Bridge.
Ortiz, Simon J..
Men on the Moon: collected short stories.
Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999.
Stories about situations that affect the lives of Native Americans who live on the land or in cities. Contains
The Killing of a State Cop
.