Langston Hughes

WINNER OF THE 2007 CORETTA SCOTT KING ILLUSTRATOR HONOR AWARD A fresh design and appealing new cover enliven this award-winning collection in the acclaimed Poetry for Young People series. Showcasing the extraordinary Langston Hughes, it's edited by two leading poetry experts and features gallery-quality art by Benny Andrews that adds rich dimension to the words. Hughes's magnificent, powerful words still resonate today, and the anthologized poems in this splendid volume include his best-loved works: "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"; "My People"; "Words Like Freedom"; "Harlem"; and "I, Too"--his sharp, pointed response to Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing."

Arnold Rampersad is the author of the widely acclaimed two-volume biography The Life of Langston Hughes as well as Days of Grace: A Memoir, co-authored with Arthur Ashe, and Jackie Robinson: A Biography. He has also edited several books, among them The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (with David Roessel). He is professor of English and senior associate dean at Stanford University, an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the American Philosophical Society, and a recipient of a MacArthur Foundation fellowship. David Roessel is the editor or co-editor of several books on American poetry and drama, including The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (with Arnold Rampersad), and Poems/Hughes. He is also the author of In Byron’s Shadow: Modern Greece in the English, and American Imagination, winner of the Modern Language Association Prize for Independent Scholars. Benny Andrews’ work is in the permanent collections of more than 30 major museums, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC. A recipient of the Abby Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, Mr. Andrews was a member of the National Academy of Design and also served as director of the Visual Arts Program for the National Endowment for the Arts. He died in November, 2006.