Mari Evans has become as much of a household name in the 1980s as Nikki Giovanni was in the 1960s. Her volumes of poetry, her books for adolescents, her work for television and other media, and her recently published volume on black women writers between 1950 and 1980 ensure her a lasting place among those who have made significant contributions to Afro-American life and culture. Teachers and scholars initially focused their attention on Evans in 1970 when I Am A Black Woman was published. The volume heralded the arrival of a poet who took her subject matter from the black community, and who celebrated its triumphs, especially the focus on the beauty of blackness that characterized the black arts and civil rights movements, and who would mourn its losses, especially the deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X. Identified through subject matter and stylistic experimentation with the poets of...