Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City: the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

Exploring the full range of writings by and about Whitman - not just his most famous work but also his earliest poems and stories, his conversations, letters, journals, newspaper writings, and daybooks - Reynolds gives us a full, rounded picture of the man, of his creative blending of disparate ideas and images, and his contradictory stances on race, class, and gender. Whitman's uniqueness is shown to spring primarily from his closeness to and absorption...

Chronicles the life of Dave, a nineteenth-century slave who went on to become an influential poet, artist, and potter.

Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual's maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover's quarrel with the world. Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University,...

Growing up with a mother suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and a mostly absent father, poet Nikki Grimes found herself terrorized by babysitters, shunted from foster family to foster family, and preyed upon by those she trusted. At the age of six, she poured her pain onto a piece of paper late one night--and discovered the magic and impact of writing. In this memoir in verse that will resonate with young readers and adults alike, Nikki shows how...

"A paradigm-shattering biography of Phillis Wheatley, whose poetry was at the heart of the American Revolution."--

Contains poems with the themes of love, memory, and racial confrontation.

Surveys the private life and literary accomplishments of the writer whose varied works reflect the traditions, feelings, and experiences of African Americans.

The story of Jimmy Santiago Baca, "winner of the Pushcart Prize and the American Book Award, ... called an heir to Pablo Neruda, ... [who] at the age of twenty-one ... was illiterate and facing five to ten years in a maximum-security prison for selling drugs."--Jacket.

Chronicles the life of Robert Frost and discusses his childhood in San Francisco, his college days at Dartmouth, his friendships with Edward Thomas and Ezra Pound, his writing career, and other related topics.