Frederick Douglass's "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass" is the paradigmatic freedom narrative whose formal conventions, the movement from object to subject, from silence to speech, from bondage to literacy and freedom, have shaped African American poetry for two centuries; A contemporary poet writing a freedom narrative might set it in the context of mass incarceration, using the slave narrative structure to explore the experience of a young Black man's movement from prison back into a society that continues to mark and constrain him; Harriet Jacobs's "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" extends the freedom narrative tradition to include the specific experiences of enslaved women, particularly the sexual violence of slavery and the particular forms of courage required by women's experience of bondage and escape; A student poet might write a freedom narrative poem in the voice of a contemporary undocumented immigrant, exploring how the slave narrative structure applies to other experiences of imposed legal invisibility and dangerous movement toward freedom; The freedom narrative's movement from bondage to liberty is complicated by post-slavery African American history, as poets have written about the discovery that emancipation brought not freedom but a different form of constraint, generating "neo-slave narratives" that trace the continuities between slavery and subsequent racial oppression; Sonia Sanchez's and Amiri Baraka's more politically militant poems can be read as freedom narratives of political consciousness, tracing the speaker's movement from false consciousness to racial and political awakening as their own form of liberation journey