The Conning Tower of the New York World for _Noblesse Oblige_ by Jessie Redmond Fauset The Crisis for _That Hill_ by Blanche Taylor Dickinson; _Nocturne at Bethesda_ by Arna Bontemps; _Letters Found Near a Suicide_ by Frank Horne; _Morning Light_ by Mary Effie Lee Newsome; _Dunbar_ by Anne Spencer The Century for _My City_ by James Weldon Johnson Vanity Fair for _Bottled_ by Helene Johnson Palms for _A Tree Design_ by Arna Bontemps; _Lines to a Nasturtium_ by Anne Spencer; _Black Madonna_ by Albert Rice; _Words! Words!_ by Jessie Fauset; _Magula_ by Helene Johnson; and _The Mask_ by Clarissa Scott Delany Fire for _Jungle Taste_ by Edward S. Silvera; _Length of Moon_ by Arna Bontemps; _The Death Bed_ by Waring Cuney The World Tomorrow for _A Black Man Talks of Reaping_ by Arna Bontemps The Survey for _Russian Cathedral_ by Claude McKay The Atlantic Monthly for _Nativity_ and _The Serving Girl_ by Gladys Casley Hayford The Carolina Magazine for _The Dark Brother_ by Lewis Alexander FOREWORD It is now five years since James Weldon Johnson edited with a brilliant essay on “The Negro’s Creative Genius” _The Book of American Negro Poetry_, four years since the publication of Robert T. Kerlin’s _Negro Poets and Their Poems_, and three years since from the Trinity College Press in Durham, North Carolina, came _An Anthology of Verse by American Negroes_, edited by Newman Ivey White and Walter Clinton Jackson. The student of verse by American Negro poets will find in these three anthologies comprehensive treatment of the work of Negro poets from Phyllis Wheatley, the first American Negro known to have composed verses, to writers of the present day. With Mr. Johnson’s scholarly and painstaking survey, from both a historical and a critical standpoint, of the entire range of verse by American Negroes, and with Professor Kerlin’s inclusions of excerpts from the work of most of those Negro poets whose poems were extant at the time of his compilation, there would be scant reason for the assembling and publication of another such collection were it not for the new voices that within the past three to five years have sung so significantly as to make imperative an anthology recording some snatches of their songs. To those intelligently familiar with what is popularly termed the renaissance in art and literature by Negroes, it will not be taken as a sentimentally risky observation to contend that the recent yearly contests conducted by Negro magazines, such as _Opportunity_ and _The Crisis_, as well as a growing tendency on the part of white editors to give impartial consideration to the work of Negro writers, have awakened to a happy articulation many young Negro poets who had thitherto lisped only in isolated places in solitary numbers. It is primarily to give them a concerted hearing that this collection has been published. For most of these poets the publication of individual volumes of their poems is not an immediate issue.