The document introduces six influential Black female poets and writers from the Black Arts Movement: Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jayne Cortez, Ntozake Shange, and Carolyn Rodgers. Students are instructed to choose one of these women to focus on for a writing assignment by reviewing playlist videos about them and the Black Arts Movement.

1. The Black Women’s Rhetoric Project
http://blackwomenrhetproject.org
Unit Six Go through the playlist videos
From the Black of the six female poets and
Arts Movement to writers listed here who
Spoken Word emerge during the Black
Artists Arts Movement.
Part I of Your Choose one woman who you
will focus on for your
Assignment writing.

2. What is the Black Arts Movement?
“The Black Arts movement
was the only American Black women during BAM wrote
literary movement to both within the movement
AND against it. Taken
advance "social together,BAM women set
engagement" as a sine qua the stage for the black
non of its aesthetic… and women’s literary boom
dashed forward toward an that followed (including
alternative that initially works of Alice Walker, Toni
seemed unthinkable and Morrison, Ruby Dee,Maya
Angelou) and the political
unobtainable: Black Power.” terrain for the new wave of
~ Kalumaya Salaam Black Feminism.

3. Sonia Sanchez
Born in 1934….
Poet. Mother. Professor. National and International
lecturer on Black Culture and Literature, Women’s
Liberation, Peace and Racial Justice. Sonia
Sanchez is the author of over 16 books including
Homecoming, We a BaddDDD People, Love
Poems, I’ve Been a Woman, A Sound Investment
and Other Stories, Homegirls and
Handgrenades, Under a Soprano Sky, Wounded in
the House of a Friend, Does Your House Have
Lions?,Like the Singing Coming off the
Drums, Shake Loose My Skin, and most
recently, Morning Haiku.
http://soniasanchez.net/

4. Sonia Sanchez
“And I cried… for all the
women who have ever
stretched their bodies out
anticipating
civilization, and finding
ruins…”

5. Nikki Giovanni
Born 1943…
Nikki Giovanni is a world-renowned
poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. One of the
most widely-read American poets, she prides herself on being "a
Black American, a daughter, a mother, a professor of English."
Giovanni remains as determined and committed as ever to the
fight for civil rights and equality. Always insisting on presenting
the truth as she sees it, she has maintained a prominent place
as a strong voice of the Black community. Her focus is on the
individual, specifically, on the power one has to make a
difference in oneself, and thus, in the lives of others.
http://nikki-giovanni.com/

6. Nikki Giovanni
“We write because we
believe the human spirit
cannot be tamed and
should not be trained.”

7. Gwendolyn Brooks
Sunrise 1917 Sunset 2000
Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in
Bronzeville(1945), published by Harper and Row, earned
instant critical acclaim. With her second book of
poetry, Annie Allen (1950), she became the first African
American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry.
Brooks will be an icon for us in the Black Arts Movement
because of her essential role in funding, mentoring, and
supporting many BAM artists and their work in numerous
ways.

8. Gwendolyn Brooks
“What I'm fighting for now in my
work... for an expression relevant
to all manner of blacks, poems I
could take into a tavern, into the
street, into the halls of a housing
project.”

9. Jayne Cortez
Sunrise 1934 Sunset 2012
Cortez gave her first public poetry readings
with the Watts Repertory Theater
Company, a Los Angeles ensemble she
founded in 1964, when she began
performing her work to musical
accompaniment. For the past three
decades she toured and recorded with
her own band, The Firespitters. Meant for
the ear even more than for the eye, her
poetry was known for its combination of
written verse, African and African-
American oral traditions, political
protest, and jazz and blues.
http://www.jaynecortez08.com/

10. Jayne Cortez
Invoking Duke Ellington’s 1956 “A Drum Is a
Woman,” Cortez writes “If the Drum Is a
Woman,” one of her best-known works, to indict
violence against women:
“why are you pounding your drum into an insane
babble
why are you pistol-whipping your drum at dawn
why are you shooting through the head of your
drum
and making a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don’t abuse your drum …”

11. NtozakeShange
Born 1948
Shange is a
playwright, poet, and black
feminist, best known the
Obie Award-winning play
and choreopoem, For
Colored Girls Who Have
Considered Suicide When
the Rainbow Is Enuf. She
has also written numerous
works of fiction, including
Sassafras, Cypress and
Indigo, Betsy Brown, and
Liliane.

12. NtozakeShange
“ifound god in myself &i loved her / i
loved her fiercely.”

13. Carolyn Rodgers
Sunrise 1940 Sunset 2010
A student of Gwendolyn
Brooks, Rodgers was a leading BAM
poet. Her collections of poetry
include Paper Soul (1968), Songs of
a Blackbird (1969), which won the
Poet Laureate Award of the Society
of Midland Authors,how I got ovah:
New and Selected Poems (1975), The
Heart as Ever Green: Poems
(1978), and Morning Glory: Poems
(1989).

14. Carolyn Rodgers
“I think sometimes wheniwrite God
has his hand on me i am his little
black slim ink pen.”

15. The Black Women’s Rhetoric Project
http://blackwomenrhetproject.org
Unit Six Go through the playlist videos
From the Black of the six female poets and
Arts Movement to writers listed here who
Spoken Word emerge during the Black
Artists Arts Movement.
Part I of Your Choose one woman who you
will focus on for your
Assignment writing.