
American literature is not only more than Hawthorne and Poe; it is more than English. Long before the Harlem Renaissance, African American poets and their white colleagues were writing in Louisiana, in French, with a quality inspired and polished by a sense of poetic community...


"Creole poets have always eluded easy definition, infusing European poetic forms with Louisiana themes and Native American and African influences to produce an impressive variety of highly accomplished verses. The first major collection of its kind, Creole Echoes contains over...