In honor of Black Poetry Day on October 17th, 2025, here are five contemporary Black Poets that you should be aware of, if you aren’t already.
Amanda Gorman is a twenty-seven-year-old award-winning writer, activist, and model. She graduated from Harvard cum laude and is the youngest inaugural poet in US history. Gorman was appointed the first-ever National Youth Poet Laureate by Urban Word. She is the recipient of the Poets & Writers Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Awards and is the youngest board member of 826 National, the largest youth writing network in the United States. In 2021, The Hill We Climb was published, which includes “The Hill We Climb: An Inaugural Poem for the Country”. She read the poem during the 2021 presidential inauguration, which helped her and her writing gain huge visibility. She also published a second collection of poetry in 2024, titled Call Us What We Carry, and two children’s books in 2021 and 2023, titled Change Sings and Something, Someday, respectively.
Jaricho Brown is a forty-nine-year-old poet, scholar, and current director of the Creative Writing Program at Emory University. He’s taught at various institutions, including the University of Houston and the University of San Diego. His collection of poetry, The Tradition, was awarded the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He’s also a winner of various awards, including the Whiting Award, the American Book Award, and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for his 2008 book, Please, and his 2014 book, New Testament. He’s also the recipient of various Fellowships, from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Redcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Aja Monet is a thirty-eight-year-old poet, musician, and activist. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 2009, where she was awarded the Andrea Klein Willison Prize for Poetry, and she received her MFA in writing from the Art Institute of Chicago. At the age of nineteen in 2007, Monet was the youngest poet and the only woman to ever hold the title of Nuyorican Poets Cafe Grand Slam Champion. She’s the author of My Mother Was a Freedom Fighter, and her new collection of poems, Florida Water, is due out in late 2025. Most recently, Monet has won the 2024 Nelson Mandela Changemaker Award, the 2024 Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Awards, and the 2025 Malcom X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Vanguard Award.
Danez Smith is a thirty-six-year-old, queer non-binary poet, writer, and performer. Smith was a First Wave Urban Arts Scholar at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduated from the University of Michigan, and now teaches at Randolph College in their MFA program. They’ve been awarded the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Forward Prize, among many other awards, grants, and fellowships. They are the authors of four poetry collections, including Dont Call Us Dead (2017) and, most recently, Bluff (2024).
Terrance Hayes is a fifty-three-year-old poet and educator who received the MacArthur Fellowship in 2014. He received his MFA from the University of Pittsburgh, where he later taught English. Hayes was a professor of Creative Writing at Carnegie Mellon University until 2013, and he currently teaches at NYU. His 2010 poetry collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for poetry that year, and he has published seven poetry collections, many of which have won various awards, including the Whiting Award, the Kate Tufts Discovery Awards, and the National Poetry Series.