Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance

Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the Americas (MELA)

by Maureen Honey (Editor)

The first edition of Shadowed Dreams was a groundbreaking anthology that brought to light the contributions of women poets to the Harlem Renaissance. This revised and expanded version contains twice the number of poems found in the original, many of them never before reprinted, and adds eighteen new voices to the collection to once again strike new ground in African American literary history. Also new to this edition are nine period illustrations and updated biographical introductions for each poet.

Shadowed Dreams features new poems by Gwendolyn Bennett, Anita Scott Coleman, Mae Cowdery, Blanche Taylor Dickinson, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Jessie Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimké, Gladys Casely Hayford (a k a Aquah Laluah), Virginia Houston, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Helene Johnson, Effie Lee Newsome, Esther Popel, and Anne Spencer, as well as writings from newly discovered poets Carrie Williams Clifford, Edythe Mae Gordon, Alvira Hazzard, Gertrude Parthenia McBrown, Beatrice Murphy, Lucia Mae Pitts, Grace Vera Postles, Ida Rowland, and Lucy Mae Turner, among others.

Covering the years 1918 through 1939 and ranging across the period’s major and minor journals, as well as its anthologies and collections, Shadowed Dreams provides a treasure trove of poetry from which to mine deeply buried jewels of black female visions in the early twentieth century.

Genres: Poetry, African American, Anthologies

264 pages, Paperback

First published September 1, 1989

About the author

Maureen Honey is a professor of English and women’s and gender studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She is the author or editor of numerous works, including Shadowed Dreams: Women’s Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance and Double-Take: A Revisionist Harlem Renaissance Anthology.

Reviews

[Bridget TA · Rating 4 out of 5]

as a poet I was able to learn more about past techniques and common themes. as a black woman I felt as if I was walking with the women of my history. this collection was well put together and I met some new favorite powers through this book.

[Sara Madden · Rating 5 out of 5]

I consulted Shadowed Dreams while researching Black women's writing during the Harlem Renaissance, and it became particularly useful to me when thinking about the fragments of writing inside Girl in Blue.

Poetry allows something historical records often do not: contradiction.

Love beside anger. Fear beside courage. Beauty beside injustice. A woman can write something unfinished, private, emotional, strange, or fiercely personal without explaining herself for an archive.

Flora's notebooks became that kind of space.

She is trying to understand race, privilege, love, violence, friendship, and her own place inside all of it long before she possesses the language to do so neatly.

I did not want her writing to sound like a historian looking backward from the twenty-first century.

I wanted it to sound like a young woman struggling toward understanding on paper.

Women's poetry from the period reminded me how powerful those imperfect, immediate records can be.

Sometimes the unfinished thought tells us more than the polished one.

Consulted in research for: Echoes in Print
Returned to while writing: Girl in Blue

[Demetria · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 Stars

[courtney · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent and expansive collection of women's poetry from the harlem renaissance. the introduction helps understand why so many of these voices were lost for so long and the subtle ways in which they challenged the mainstream.