10 *More Books on Craft by Writers of Color
It may not be every day that we turn to a craft book the way we turn to poetry–poems are on our Instagram feeds, in our Tweets, tattooed onto our bodies, even making cameos in our TV shows (Lovecraft Country I’m looking at you). But when we do have the capacity to go deeper into our poetic studies, where do we turn?
The first article in this series, 10 Craft Books by Writers of Color acknowledges that over the course of academic study, I was continuously given craft and critical texts written by white scholars. This is a pitiful reality, when we know that the best writing happening in the United States today is by people of color. From Ocean Vuong to Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, we’re seeing poets of color take center stage on bestseller lists, becoming true cross-over artists. In the first article, I also posit that my definition of “craft books” is a broad one. I consider craft books to be books on theory, criticism, terminology, technique, pedagogy, the writing life, and pathways toward empathy. These books help us reimagine how we hold space.
That said, let’s dive into another 10 essential craft books you’ll want to add to your list.
Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being
Kevin Quashie
WORLD MAKING, THEORY
Starting this list with a banger. Professor and writer, Kevin Quashie, takes us back to school in this theory-to-end-all-theory book: Black Aliveness, Or a Poetics of Being. In it, Quashie uses the poetry aesthetics of Lucille Clifton, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, and Evie Shockley to propose what it means to consider black aliveness in a world where “blackness is indexed to death.”
“To behold such aliveness,” Quashie writes in his introduction, “we have to imagine a black world…we have to imagine a black world so as to surpass the everywhere and everyway of black death, of blackness that is understood only through such a vocabulary.”
While I highly recommend Black Aliveness, it isn’t a casual read in content or in style. The writing is measured and academic. Still, “black studies is a spiritual discipline,” writes critic and author J. Kameron Carter. “Quashie gives intellectual and theoretical tools” in this text.
Of Color: Poets' Ways of Making: An Anthology of Essays on Transformative Poetics
Edited by Luisa A. Igloria and Amanda Galvan Huynh
ANTHOLOGY
With essays by Ocean Vuong, Ching-In Chen, Khadijah Queen, and Craig Santos Perez among others, Of Color is one of the best craft books by an Indie press that you’ll find. We absolutely need to spend more time highlighting transformative poetics brought to us by non-university presses. It’s hard to describe all that goes on inside Of Color, so I turn to some of the book’s foundational questions. Here you will find essays that ask:
How do poets of color come to know what they do about their art and practice?
How best can poets of color discuss and pass on what they have learned to others?
Is one a real poet if one does not have an MFA?
Dear Continuum: Letters to a Poet Crafting Liberation
Mariahadessa EkereTallie
ESSAYS, PARENTHOOD
Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie is a self-care advocate, children’s book author, blogger, and filmmaker. Dear Continuum is a book of letters and essays formed by the continuum between writer to student. “I had looked in the eyes of those students and seen exactly whom I was writing for and to,” Tallie writes, “Those students, whose faces were full of light, warmth, and love, were a continuum of my work just as I am continuum of so many other people’s work.”
Inspirational and expansive, read Dear Continuum if you’re a developing poet. Maybe you liked Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, but you crave a modern mindset shift. Tallie’s generous and encouraging letters and essays will guide you.
Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry
Dorothy J. Wang
ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
I’m really excited to include this book on our list. Published in 2015, Wang’s Thinking Its Presence has been called a passionate meditation that asks the question “can race sit at the poetry table?” by critic David L. Eng. These essays give rich and in-depth discourse on poets such as Li-Young Lee, Marilyn Chin and Mei-mei Berssenbrugge.
Elsewhere in the book, Wang delves into the worlds of academia and literary criticism. For the poetry-obsessed mega-geek in me, books like this make me feel like I’m getting all the hot gos’ from the world of poetics. But there’s more at stake here than similar essays by writers like David Orr. The central thesis of Thinking Its Presence is that critics should read poetry by minority writers with the same assiduity that they bring to their analyses of writing by white poets. With that in mind, Dorothy J. Wang shows us how it’s done.
June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint
June Jordan
COMMUNITY ORGANIZING, THEORY
This recommendation is a little tricky, so stick with me. The book I really want to include on this list is Poetry for the People because it is an extremely important book that sets the standard for revolutionary pedagogies, community organizing, and even organizing your own creative career. However, Poetry for the People is out of print and a little difficult to come by. Fortunately, there are other resources to turn to for June Jordan’s sagacity. My hope is that you are still touched by the wisdom of this extraordinary poet and activist by reading her essays and collected works. And if you are able to get your hands on a reasonably priced used copy of Poetry for the People, good for you! Here’s hoping an indie press is able to issue a reprint of that magical text one day soon.
The Essential June Jordan comes in at 256 pages of poetry and was heralded by Publisher’s Weekly as one of the best books of 2021. What I like about this book is that there is an Editor’s Note that explains the thought-process behind the collecting of poems and their organization throughout the book. Among these you will find culture critiques, love poems, and political poems.
Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays is yet another essay collection you’ll be shocked wasn’t assigned to you in school. With responses to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Walt Whitman, Phillis Wheatley, and covering topics such as black rage, the politics of sexuality, and American dreams, the breadth and width of this 320 page collection will stay with you.
Black Women Writers at Work
Edited by Claudia Tate
ANTHOLOGY, INTERVIEWS
A reprint we do have access to (thank you, Haymarket!) is Black Women Writers at Work, which compiles interviews from the 1970s and 80s with over a dozen of the century’s most influential black women and queer writers. This list includes Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Sonia Sanchez just to name a few. Called a “trailblazing classic,” “gorgeous,” and “essential” by critics, there’s no reason not to dive into the wit and wisdoms of our literary foremothers. Edited by Claudia Tate, who was a professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University, Black Women Writers at Work bears witness to the complex relationship these writers had to their work, their resistance, and their public, political, and private lives.
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll
INTERVIEWS, ASIAN AMERICAN STUDIES
In a dozen interviews collected over 20 years, Li-Young Lee discusses his literary influences, his writing practice, the roles of formal and informal education in his path to becoming a writer, and his family’s exit from political oppression in China.
If you like reading about the craft of poetry, but find essays too dense and terrifying, these interviews might be the perfect fit. Lee’s candor will engage and inspire you. This is just poets talking about poetry, mentorship, memory, and family. Sometimes there’s a story about an experience in college, other times it’s about Lee’s path to publication. I love that we still take the time to compile the words of our poetry guides.
💗Tip For Poem-Lovers
If you’re not familiar with Li-Young Lee’s work I recommend his book The City in Which I Love You, the title poem of which is an absolute banger.
The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination
Carl Phillips
CRAFT ESSAYS
Carl Phillips makes the list again! The Art of Daring is one of my favorite books in the “Art of” Series published by Graywolf. More like pamphlets than full-length books, what’s especially accessible about this series is the size of the books: each one is less than 200 pages and diminutive in size, fitting almost in the palm of your hand. Other notable books include The Art of the Poetic Line and The Art of Syntax, but The Art of Daring is a fierce standout.
Phillips keeps it real in his essays, and I appreciate that. Amongst discussion of risk, power, penetration, dreams, and restlessness, you’ll find short and long essays that expand and contract into a fascinated menagerie of the poetic lifestyle.
“The poems of mine that I consider successful are the ones where some part of me seems to have dared another part to do something that, if I were fully aware of it, I’d never do: use a certain word, let a sentence find its own wilderness, speak on subjects I’d more likely suppress talking about in my daily life.”
Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief
Victoria Chang
LETTERS, MEMOIR
A series of letters, photo collage, childhood ephemera, grief, and literary criticism, Dear Memory by Victoria Chang is yet another entry into this poet’s compendium of innovative and important work. Victoria Chang has been one of my favorite poets since I first read Circle, her debut poetry collection, published in 2005. If you are looking to read a living poet’s work from origin to avant garde, Victoria Chang is a great writer to investigate.
Some of the themes explored in Dear Memory are similar to that of Chang’s recent award-winning book Obit, but as one reviewer notes: “[Dear Memory] takes seriously the literary value of non-traditional literary elements such as collage-making, snippets of memorabilia, drawings in journals, and bureaucratic debris.” If you are interested in a mixed-media exploration of craft and artifact, this is your recommended read.
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel: Essays
Alexander Chee
FICTION, CRAFT, MEMOIR
I’d like to finish this list with a little something for everyone. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee earned many accolades in 2018 when it was first published. At the time, I was working on my manuscript with poet and editor Shira Erlichman. Shira was reading How to Write an Autobiographical Novel, and she would dazzle me with quotes and anecdotes from the book. It was enough to make me want to read it myself, even though I have no intention of ever writing an autobiographical novel! These 16 essays are thematically linked, but they’re also flexible in scope of rigor and intimacy.
While a novelist by trade, Chee is also known as a beloved writing teacher (follow him on Twitter; he is giving!) and master of the personal essay. You won’t regret accessing pearls of wisdom like these:
“Yes, everything’s been written, but also, the thing you want to write, before you wrote it, was impossible to write. Otherwise it would already exist. Your writing makes it possible.”
“1. Sometimes music is needed.
2. Sometimes silence.
3. A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound as you read it. Writing one, then, is like remembering a song you’ve never heard before.”
Final Thoughts
Whether you’re building a reading list, shopping around for the one perfect craft book, or trying to cure your imposter syndrome by reading all the things (it’s me!), I hope this book round-up is helpful to you.
Remember that craft lives in and around us–it’s constantly evolving, just like our language is, to adapt to us. Sometimes in school, especially in English classes, we are given the false pretense that everything exists as it is and forever shall be. As if new words aren’t added to the dictionary every year. As if some words fall out of use, are cataloged, but ultimately forgotten. Just today, I was sent a poem by a community member that started as an email she was sending to me. It existed on the page as a dynamic text, part email, part poem, part essay. It was also part heartbreak, part breath, part sig-alert. There was something completely original, and utterly familiar about the piece. My point is this: read the books, study your craft, learn the rules, then…grow beyond them.
Enjoy that journey, poet. And good luck!
This article was posted on February 21, 2023. Written by:
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