Colorado Parks & Wildlife Research Library

A fictionalized biography of the eighteenth-century African woman who, as a child, was brought to New England to be a slave, and after publishing her first poem when a teenager, gained renown throughout the colonies as an important black American poet.

In the summer of 1968, after travelling from Brooklyn to Oakland, California, to spend a month with the mother they barely know, eleven-year-old Delphine and her two younger sisters arrive to a cold welcome as they discover that their mother, a dedicated poet and printer, is resentful of the intrusion of their visit and wants them to attend a nearby Black Panther summer camp.

When the renowned poet Fiona Skinner is asked about the inspiration behind her iconic work, The Love Poem, she tells her audience a story about her family and a betrayal that reverberates through time. It begins in a big yellow house with a funeral, an iron poker, and a brief variation forever known as the Pause: a free and feral summer in a middle-class Connecticut town. Caught between the predictable life they once led and an uncertain future that...

Smoke From This Altar, a book that has become legendary among Louis L'Amour readers, is the very first book L'Amour ever published. It appeared, to great critical praise, for sale only in Oklahoma bookstores more than fifty years ago. Since then it has become the most sought-after L'Amour title of all, with the few circulating copies from the small print run commanding top dollar from rare book collectors. Now, at last, it is being published nationally...