At the end of Black History Month for 2026, I was impressed to see a new high in monthly traffic for the digital collection I edit on African American Poetry: 40,000 users in February!
40,000 users in a month is a jawdropping number that is a little hard to comprehend, especially considering most academic articles I might otherwise publish would be read by 100 people or less. Even for other digital collections I have edited, I would consider 5% of that traffic -- 2000 users a month -- to constitute success, so this is really a different scale. Admittedly, at least some of the new traffic might be bots and generative AI scrapers; I've seen a significant uptick in users in China, though I would be surprised to learn that African American literature in English has suddenly appeared on university syllabi there.
Of course all credit really goes to the amazing writers whose works are collected on the site -- there is clearly a large number of folks out there looking for these materials, both inside and outside of academia. Writings by Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Claude McKay are the most in demand.
I have also been making some regular updates and additions to the site.
1. A simple digital edition of the volume, "Four Lincoln University Poets" (1930). It includes poems by Langston Hughes, Edward Silvera, and Waring Cuney. All three influential Harlem Renaissance poets were undergrads at Lincoln at the same time! (Admittedly, Hughes was a little older than most other students -- he had spent several years in the early 1920s wandering the world as a sailor even as his literary career was taking off in the pages of magazines like The Crisis. When he decided to back to college in 1926, he landed on Lincoln, then a fairly modest but well-reputed HBCU outside of Philadelphia.)
2. An author page for Harlem Renaissance poet Waring Cuney.
Cuney's best-known poem is the free verse "No Images"; it was widely anthologized at the time:
She does not know
Her beauty
She thinks her brown body
Has no glory
If she could dance
Naked
Under palm trees
And see her image in the river
She would know
But there are no palm trees
On the street
And dish water gives back no images
3. A stub author page for poet Azalia E. Martin (active 1900-1910). Sadly, I couldn't find much biographical information on her.
However, see her powerful 1906 poem "A Protest":
"Ye who would stop the progress of a race,
Give ear; that race would question thee."
4. Improved author pages for Harlem Renaissance poets Edward Silvera and Lewis Alexander. I tracked down the only publicly available photo of Edward Silvera from a Lincoln University yearbook. (I've asked the Lincoln U. library for a higher-res version...) Once I can track down a better / higher res. version of a photo, I might take a stab at making a Wikipedia page for Edward Silvera.
5. Added new poems by Lucian Watkins, mostly discovered in the Richmond Planet newspaper, via the Library of Virginia's website. Watkins served in the Army and was stationed in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War (1898-1900) and the war against Filipino independence fighters that followed (early 1900s). Based on an entry in the Planet, it seems like we can confirm that he remained enlisted in the Army all the way through the World War I years (1918).