African American Women Writers

Harryette Mullen's fifth poetry collection, Sleeping with the Dictionary, is the abecedarian offspring of her collaboration with two of the poet's most seductive writing partners, Roget's Thesaurus and The American Heritage Dictionary. In her ménage à trois with these faithful companions, the poet is aware that while Roget seems obsessed with categories and hierarchies, the American Heritage, whatever its faults, was compiled with the assistance of a democratic usage panel that included black poets Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, as well as feminist author and editor Gloria Steinem. With its arbitrary yet determinant alphabetical arrangement, its gleeful pursuit of the ludic pleasure of word games (acrostic, anagram, homophone, parody, pun), as well as its reflections on the politics of language and dialect, Mullen's work is serious play.

Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T,and Muse & Drudge were all originally published in the 1990s and are now available again to new readers. These prose poems and lyrics bring us into collision with the language of fashion and femininity, advertising and the supermarket, the blues and traditional lyric poetry..

Gale Researcher Guide for: Poetic Form and Its Frustrations: Harryette Mullen, Claudia Rankine, and Terrance Hayes is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.

Interviews with leading contemporary African American poets offers an in-depth look at the cultural and aesthetic perspectives of the post-Black Arts Movement generation. This volume includes interviews with Wanda Coleman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Thylias Moss, Harryette Mullen, Cornelius Eady, Elizabeth Alexander, Rita Dove and Cyrus Cassells. Although these poets reject a rigid adherence to a specific Black aesthetic, their work effectively probes racism, stereotyping, and racial politics.

A historical and theoretical account of avant-garde women poets in America from the 1910s through the 1990s and asserts an alternative tradition to the predominantly male-dominated avant-garde movements. Elisabeth Frost focuses on a diverse group of poets--Gertrude Stein, Mina Loy, Sonia Sanchez, Susan Howe, and Harryette Mullen--who make language the site of feminist politics.