Still We Write: 10 Black Poets Holding the Line and Expanding the Form
Black contemporary poetry lives in a lot of lanes at once, and that is exactly what makes it feel so…alive.
Through our “Still We Write” series celebrating contemporary Black poets for National Poetry Month, we’ve profiled several significant poets, but we also want to share a solid list of more Black contemporary poets worth reading and giving a listen.
Tongo Eisen-Martin writes as an organizer and educator; Moor Mother works at the intersection of poetry, sound, and activism; Karisma Price builds a lyrical world out of Blackness, family, and public history; Nadia Alexis joins poetry and photography to chart Haitian American lineage and survival; Nate Marshall brings Black vernacular, hip-hop, and teaching into the same breath; Ajanaé Dawkins moves from slam to docu-poetry and theology; Ebony Stewart makes performance poetry feel urgent, intimate, and embodied; Jasmin Benward brings a Black queer, sapphic, interdisciplinary lens, writing at the intersection of literature, music, and film; Amanda Gorman brings a luminous, civic-minded voice to poetry; and Adedayo Agarau writes from the charged terrain of Nigerian memory, grief, and ritual.
That is what it means that these poets still write: they keep making language roomy enough to hold inheritance, rage, tenderness, and the future at the same time. Ahead, these nine writers move across page and stage, music and memory, scholarship and performance, using each poem like another pathway to truth. Check out some standout pieces from these Black contemporary poets:
Tongo Eisen-Martin
Eisen-Martin’s poems move between political critique and dream logic, and his work centers mass incarceration, extrajudicial violence, and human rights without losing tenderness or lyric force.
Moor Mother
Camae Ayewa, aka Moor Mother, turns poetry into a sound archive, folding colonial history, displacement, and Black futurity into work that hits like testimony and warning at the same time.
Karisma Price
Price’s debut, “I’m Always So Serious,” is a sharp, funny, aching meditation on Blackness, family, loss, and the mythic weight of New Orleans, and her poems feel like they know how to turn private grief into public song.
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Nate Marshall
Marshall writes like a poet who knows Black vernacular is already its own archive; his work braids Chicago, hip-hop, teaching, and social critique into something communal and unmistakably alive.
Nadia Alexis
Alexis’s debut hybrid collection joins poetry and photography to explore Haitian American daughterhood, domestic violence, survival, and reclamation with a voice that is both tender and unflinching.
Ebony Stewart
Stewart’s work sits at the collision of gender, sexuality, womanhood, and race, and her performances make clear that the point is not just what she has lived through, but how the work lands in the room.
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Ajanaé Dawkins
Dawkins moves from slam to docu-poetry with a voice that treats story as sacred, and her practice makes room for Black girlhood, theology, education, and witness all at once.
Adedayo Agarau
Agarau writes from Nigeria and the diaspora with an attention to memory, ritual violence, abduction, and Yoruba cosmology that gives his work a haunting, urgent charge.
Jasmin Benward
A self-proclaimed word-weaver, sound-sculptor, and artful-disruptor, Benward writes for the queers, culture lovers, and foodies.
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Amanda Gorman
Gorman’s work moves with purpose and poise, balancing lyric beauty with a deep sense of public responsibility. She has built a body of work that speaks to race, feminism, youth leadership, and the power of language to reshape the world.
