Robert Hayden : the apprenticeship : Heart-shape in the dust (1940) / Pontheolla T. Williams -- Gwendolyn Brooks : the 1940s : a milieu for integrationist poetics / B.J. Bolden -- Black modernism? The early poetry of Jean Toomer and Claude McKay / Wolfgang Karrer -- The adventures of a social poet : Langston Hughes from the popular front to black power / James Smethurst -- Inventing a "Negro literature" : race, dialect, and gender in the early work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson / Caroline Gebbhard -- Creative collaboration : as African American as sweet potato pie / Frances Smith Foster -- "Bid the gifted Negro soar" : the origins of the African American bardic tradition / Keith D. Leonard -- Rewriting Dunbar : realism, Black women poets, and the genteel / Paula Bernat Bennett -- The Harlem Renaissance : depicting the "new Negro" / Lena Ahlin -- A familiar strangeness : the spectre of whiteness in the Harlem Renaissance and the Black arts movement / Emily Bernard -- Lyric stars : Countee Cullen and Langston Hughes / James Smethurst -- What a difference a "way" makes : Wheatley's ways of knowing / April C.E. Langley.