Joanne M. Braxton is a young and talented scholar-poet who has accomplished a good deal in a short time. Although similar in certain respects to the new black poets of the 1960s and early 1970s, Braxton nonetheless strikes out in new directions in style and theme that may suggest new directions for Afro-American poetry more generally.

Joanne Margaret Braxton was born in the old Freedman's Hospital in Washington, D.C. She grew up in Lakeland, a small town fifteen miles outside Washington. She is the only daughter of Harry McHenry Braxton, Sr., a retired machinist, and Mary Weems Braxton, a clerical worker and later a homemaker. The Braxtons also had three sons: Harry Braxton, Jr., Douglas Weems Braxton, and James Alfred ("Billy") Weems (deceased). Also living during Braxton's earliest years were her two grandmothers, Emma Margaret Harrison, and Mary Elizabeth ("Miss Maime") Weems. Family ties are significant thematically...