ALFRED BENNETT (A. B.) SPELLMAN is a poet and jazz critic whose books include The Beautiful Days (1964), Four Jazz Lives (1966), and Things I Must Have Known (2008). His work at the NEA was honored with the establishment of the A. B. Spellman Award for Jazz Advocacy. He has served on panels such as the Rockefeller Panel and as a member of the Advisory Group for the African-American Museum of the Smithsonian Institute. LAURI SCHEYER is Xiaoxiang Scholars Program Distinguished Professor and founding Director of the British and American Poetry Research Center at Hunan Normal University (China). Her many prior books include A History of African American Poetry and Slave Songs and the Birth of African American Poetry.

"A comprehensive collection of the poetry of A. B. Spellman, who is an influential poet with a long career reaching. His work is a bridge between the New American Poetry counterculture of the 1950s and the 1960s and the Black Arts Movement"--