Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement

Phelps opens up new space in the study of African American women's poetry and black feminism. She reconsiders the Chicago Black Arts Movement and its legacies by foregrounding the productive nature of tension as African American women poets move with and push against the flow of the black (male) aesthetic. This long-overdue book deepens our understanding of the role of the Black Arts Movement in the formation of post-1960s African American women's literature. Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Dilution Anxiety and the Black Phallus and coeditor of New Thoughts on the Black Arts Movement

Visionary Women Writers of Chicago's Black Arts Movement fills a gap in contemporary scholarship on the women writers of the Chicago Black Arts Movement. Its discussion of OBAC and of Johari Amini, Carolyn Rodgers, and Angela Jackson begins to untangle the complex subtleties of that movement—its paradoxes, its challenges, its achievements, and its legacy. Indeed, it is required reading for scholars interested in contemporary black women's poetry specifically and in the Black Arts Movement more generally. Dana A. Williams, professor of African American literature at Howard University