James Weldon Johnson entered the world on June 17, 1871, in Jacksonville, Florida, a bustling port city where the St. Johns River met the Atlantic and where the scars of Reconstruction still lingered in the humid air. He left it on June 26, 1938, in a car accident near Wiscasset, Maine, at the age of sixty-seven, his body laid to rest in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery. Between those dates stretched a life of astonish…
“The Negro in the United States is not a racial problem. He is a human problem.”
Neighbourhood:
African American Poets, American Poets, Harlem Renaissance, Political Poets, Social Justice Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Wonder, Longing
Amastan Ag Mohamed, conventionally dated c. 1803–1878 in modern retellings, occupies an unusual and revealing place in the imaginative history of Saharan literature. He is not a historically documented nineteenth-century Tuareg poet in the ordinary biographical sense. Rather, he is a fictional figure created to give a personal face to the cultural world from which traditional Tuareg desert poetry emerges. The name, t…
Neighbourhood:
Folk & Ballad Poets, Mystical & Spiritual Poets, Nature Poets, Persian Mystic Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
