The much-celebrated experimental play for colored girls who have considered suicide, when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem (1977), by Ntozake Shange, addresses issues of race, class, and gender in the lives of African-American women.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (1985), by August Wilson, is the most celebrated play by an African-American writer of the 1980s. It takes place in Chicago during the 1920s and centers on the blues singer Ma Rainey and her band.

Flyin' West (1995), by Pearl Cleage, takes place on the frontier of the American West and concerns a family of African-American homesteaders.

Bourbon at the Border (1997), published in Flyin' West and Other Plays (1999), by Pearl Cleage, is a play about a middle-aged couple in an apartment building in Detroit, reflecting back on their years of political activism during the 1960s.

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes (1994), edited by Arnold...