This volume brings together much of the poetry and a selection of correspondence by an enormously talented but underappreciated poet of the Harlem Renaissance. Cousin of novelist Dorothy West and friend of Zora Neale Hurston, Helene Johnson (1905-1995) first gained literary prominence when James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost selected three of her poems for prizes in a 1926 competition. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, her poetry appeared in various small magazines. In 1933, she married, and two years later her last published poem appeared in
Challenge , the journal West had founded to revive the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance.