Black musical forms profoundly influenced the work of American poet and leading literary figure Lorenzo Thomas, and he wrote about them with keen insight---and obvious pleasure. This book, begun by Thomas before his death in 2005, collects more than a dozen of his savvy yet engagingly personal essays that probe the links between African American music, literature, and popular culture, from the Harlem Renaissance to the present.

Don't Deny My Name (which takes its title from a blues song by Jelly Roll Morton) begins by laying out the case that the blues is a body of literature...

This study of C. L. R. James's writings is the first to look at them as literature and not as theory. This sustained analysis of his major published works places them in the context of his less well-known writings and offers an encompassing critique of one of the African diaspora's most significant thinkers and writers.

Here the author of Black Jacobins, World Revolution, A History of Pan-African Revolt,, Beyond a Boundary, and the lyric novel Minty Alley is seen not only as among the great political philosophers but also as the literary artist that he...