Foreword to the 1989 Edition

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the exciting rediscovery of figures like Countée Cullen, Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright (to name a few of the most well known), many young black women writers and scholars wondered aloud, at first mostly among themselves, and then to the larger world: "Where were the women who put pen to paper and gave voice to their creative impulses?"Of course, almost everyone knew of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first black poet to receive a Pulitzer prize, and radical contemporaries like June Jordan, Carolyn Rodgers, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez, who made impolite and even outrageous claims for blackness, on paper, on street corners, in local bars, and in demonstrations on college campuses and elsewhere, and they called themselves poets.But for most of us then, if there was an identifiable tradition in Afro-American literature, it was a man's world.Some of us, even as we ventured out to search for black female literary models, consoled ourselves with the idea that the women had been too busy keeping the "race" alive over its three-hundred-year-old American history to have found the time to write.Now we know that was not so.Given such an inauspicious beginning to the search for black women writers, however, the pioneers who excavated the rich mine of which we are now aware-the tradition of black women writing in America-richly deserve all the credit we can give them.And as the thirty-one volumes (with one more to come) of the recent Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers reveal, in spite of how difficult it must have been, black women wrote prolifically in all of the most popular forms-poetry, novels, short fiction, and autobiography.The first task was discovering the tradition; the second, and equally challenging, has been making the materials available to students and teachers.Maureen Honey's fine volume, Shadowed Dreams: Women's Poetry of the Harlem Renaissance, makes a strong response to that second challenge.Although scholarship on the Renaissance has burgeoned in recent years, work on women remains to be done.At the same time, most of what has already been published on women writers, xxv