Illinois Authors

Third World Press, Chicago : 1991, ©1972.

Tia Chucha Press ; Chicago : 1999.

"Sterling Plumpp's blues narratives are the first portions to be published of his ongoing work in progress, Mfua's Song. In order to discover and invent his own identity, he reaches back as far as the first ancestor of whom he can know - the woman Mfua, kidnapped in Africa, enslaved and brought to America. In this section of Mfua's Song, as twentieth-century Mary and Victor - portraits of the poet's mother and grandfather - tell their blues narratives, they not only live their own lives of pain, sorrow, dignity and love, but also embody aspects of Mfua that they bring down through the years with them and pass on to those in their care. Plumpp's blues narratives are a poetic form and a dialogue between poet and subject - they are unlike anything else in American poetry: a vital, passionate, haunting poetry meant to be read and spoken and sung."--BOOK JACKET.

Third World Press, Chicago : 1993.

Describes the life of the abolitionist who was born into slavery and later became a conductor for the Underground Railroad.

This book describes the myriad of folks that inhabit places like the up-South streets of Chicago or the unaltered roads of Mississippi, Arkansas, Georgia, and other pockets inhabited by Blacks throughout the South. The author has lived with these folks--sharecroppers, preachers, misplaced Mississippi blues men and women.

Third World Press, Chicago, IL : ©1995.

Hornman officiates the pauses, whirlwinds and boptismal journey of saxophonist Von Freeman through the distinctive cadence of blues verse. Brilliantly linking his poetic vision with his insights into Black and blues culture, Sterling Plumpp provides lyrical access to the inner soul of Black-and-blues folk.--Page [4] of cover.

Ever since its first flowering in the 1920s, jazz has had a powerful influence on American poetry, and this ... anthology offers a treasury of poems as varied and vital as the music that inspired them. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Beat movement, from the poets of the New York school to the contemporary poetry scene, the jazz aesthetic has been a compelling literary force--one that Jazz poems makes palpable. We hear it in the poems of Langston Hughes, e.e. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, Frank O'Hara, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and in those of Yusef Komunyakaa, Charles Simic, Rita Dove, Ntozake Shange, Mark Doty, and C.D. Wright. Here are poems that pay tribute to jazz's great voices, and poems that throb with the vivid rhythm and energy of the jazz tradition, ranging in tone from mournful elegy to sheer celebration.

6th December, 2013. Johannesburg. Gin has returned home from New York to throw a party for her mother's 80th birthday; a few blocks away, at the Residence, Nelson Mandela's family prepares to announce Tata Mandela's death. So begins 'Johannesburg', Fiona Melrose's searing second novel. Responsive to Virginia Woolf's 'Mrs Dalloway', the story follows a polyphonic course across a single day, culminating in a party and traces the fractures and connections of the city.

Another Chicago Press ; Chicago : ©1993.

"A poetic and autobiographical fusing of three landscapes: the poet's native Mississippi, Chicago, and South Africa where Sterling Plumpp travelled in 1992. Plumpp paints here stunning and lyrical parallels between Black lives in the US and Black lives in South Africa. Through the prism of the blues Plumpp sees sharecroppers, maids, and the struggle for civil rights on two continents. Like a blues song, Johannesburg is a work where the reader may find a tragic, and often comic, common humanity as composed and sung by a master."--Jacket.

Third World Press, Chicago : ©1997.

Third World, [Place of publication not identified] : 1998.

Thunder's Mouth Press, New York : ©1982.

Contains one hundred poems from classic and contemporary African American poets, as selected by an award-winning black poet and activist, including such writers as Robert Hayden, Mari Evans, Kevin Young, and Rita Dove.

Thunder's Mouth Press, New York : 1982.

Third World Press, Chicago : ©2003.