Brooklynites’ ‘Voices Beyond Bondage’ presents ‘Territory Waiting to be Explored’

October 17, 2014 Brooklyn Daily Eagle

Erika DeSimone. Photos courtesy of NewSouth Books

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Brooklynites Erika DeSimone and Louis Fidel have recently published “Voices Beyond Bondage: An Anthology of Verse by African Americans of the 19th Century” — a book that collects the poems of African Americans of the 19th Century into an historically significant volume, the first to focus on writings from black-owned presses. Nine or ten in all served what is now the greater NYC community, including The Colored American, Freedom’s Journal, The New York Freeman, Freedom’s Press, Mirror of Liberty, and The Weekly Anglo-African.

“Voices Beyond Bondage” offers a fresh perspective on African American life and identity. The poems in the anthology are not the work of a few elite literary masters but rather have been written by ordinary people — people who were compelled to verse, despite being born into a world of fundamental inequity. Whether these authors were formally schooled or self-taught, whether they were slaves, free peoples or the descendants of slaves, they put ink to paper and declared their passions in verse.

In the HuffPost blog, Erika DeSimone says that “Voices Beyond Bondage” rekindles the voice of those who have been overlooked in American literature, and presents for lovers of poetry and scholars of the African American experience alike a new literary territory waiting to be explored.

Julian Bond, Chairman Emeritus of the NAACP, says, “‘Voices Beyond Bondage’ reveals a mostly unacknowledged 19th-century literary movement and gives readers a fresh perspective on African American poets from the antebellum and postbellum periods. A rich resource.”