The poetry of Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., was a promising harbinger of the 1920s renaissance in black American literature. Innovative in technique and theme, Cotter's poems address universal concerns as well as protest the treatment of black Americans in the World War I era. In addition to his poetry, Cotter tried his hand at play writing before his untimely death at twenty-three.

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Jr., was born on 2 September 1895, in Louisville, Kentucky, son of Maria F. and Joseph Seamon Cotter. The senior Cotter, a well-known Louisville poet and educator, wrote proudly that his son had been born at home in the room in which, at Thanksgiving the year before, family friend Paul Laurence Dunbar had read his poems for the first time in the South. Cotter, Sr. had worked himself up from laborer to high school principal and nationally known poet and was able to offer his...