The Skin of Dreams

A 2020 Benjamin Franklin Award Silver Winner. Traversing twenty-three years of earth and breath, Quraysh Ali Lansana's first new and collected poems roadmaps small town Oklahoma to southside Chicago in compelling poems that question, surprise and dare. As a direct descendent of the Black Arts Movement and last student of Miss Gwendolyn Brooks, Lansana explores the complicated internal and external terrain of Blackness and history from a post-King, post-Kennedy childhood through the election of the first non-White president, while grappling with the definition of home. These are poems that cry, sing, scream and see.