As enigmatic and contradictory as far West Texas has always been, it is nevertheless surprising to learn that in 1925 its desert germinated a slender but vibrant shoot of the Harlem Renaissance. Isolated on the U.S. Mexico border, far from any metropolitan African-American community or literary influences, Bernice Love Wiggins, a perceptive young poet, self-published her first, apparently only, book of poetry. One of only a handful of black writers in Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, Wiggins was contemporary with Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston and was among the first...