7 Black Poets who make me love National Poetry Month

My first black poetry love was Langston Hughes. Before him, I didn't realize it was possible to even love poems, to make words rhyme and incite that way, to turn stanzas into emotions. His poetry taught me the value of persistence. I fell in love with Langston because he taught me about holding fast to dreams and the devastation of deferred ones. At my middle school, De La Salle Academy, we sang his poetry. "Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams die, life is a broken-winged bird/ that cannot fly."

I think of him every April, when the poets among us take note that spring offers us National Poetry Month. (Here's a little more about it on People Who Write) Along with Hughes, I can chart parts and pieces of my past by what poets I was reading or, in the case of spoken word/slam poetry in the 1990s, listening to. It was Jessica Care Moore on Showtime at the Apollo who made me want to perform what I wrote, though I was often too shy to grab a mic, if I wasn't too timid to pen a piece.

Sonia Sanchez
Please just watch her talk about Martin Luther King Jr. and stars in his eyes, our cities of alphabets. I'm pretty sure it was a Sonia Sanchez line that I read, maybe it was in Wounded in the House of a Friend, where she wrote a line about walking above the world. It stayed with me for so long I used to have a recurring dream about it.

Gwendolyn Brooks
Not just because she was the first black writer to win a Pulitzer in 1950, or because she put Chi-town on the map, or because she wrote, "We Real Cool" -- but all three. And much more.

Saul Williams
The only reason I saw Slam or went to Brooklyn back when I was a full-time Bronx Girl. My first spoken word crush.

Elizabeth Alexander
When I heard her read "Praise Song for the Day" during President Barack Obama's first inauguration, I think I expecting something far more...ostentatious than the quiet beauty in lines like these.

I know there's something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see. Say it plain: that many have died for this day. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20545#sthash.qR9RPBsR.dpuf

I know there's something better down the road. We need to find a place where we are safe. We walk into that which we cannot yet see. Say it plain: that many have died for this day. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20545#sthash.qR9RPBsR.dpuf

Alice Walker
Because she reminded me to be nobody's darling...and to live frugally on surprise.

E. Ethelbert Miller
I found one of E. Ethelbert's poems in an anthology years ago, when my Dad and I were going through it. There's a line in one of them, "let love grow through the weeds" that kept me trying to pull our father-daughter thing together -- that's what the best poetry does.

I'm looking forward to reading Angles of Ascent, a new Norton Anthology of black poetry, which includes some of my favorites that I haven't mentioned here and The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton. I could go on and on about Paul Beatty and Kevin Young and many more. Who are your favorite black poets?