Books by Frank X Walker

A new collection of persona poems from award-winning poet Frank X Walker that tell the untold story of legendary African American jockey Isaac Burns Murphy (1861¿1896).

"We all wear masks. There are people with whom we can take our masks off and speak from the heart. Professor Walker is an expert in masks, or personas. And he well knows that sometimes masks let us speak deep truths about the world. He also knows masks sometimes protect us, sometimes keep us from ourselves, and sometimes cause us pain. Paul Dunbar, in "We Wear the Mask," asks of the world and of poetry, "Why should the world be over-wise, / In counting all our tears and sighs?" Yet, it seems that now, as then, the world pays too little attention to the tears and sighs about which Dunbar sings. We are so grateful that Walker has taken the time to sit with death and pain and heartbreak, to sit and tune his voice to sing these elegies, so that we can gather around him to sing through our tears with head held high. " -Jeremy Paden

A powerful collection from Frank X Walker, winner of the 2005 Lannan Literary Fellowship for Poetry.In 68 poems, Kentucky writer Frank X Walker expertly melds autobiography, political commentary, and literary allusions into a devastatingly beautiful journey through the real "e;Affrilachia"e;- a word Walker created to render visible the lives of the African-Americans who call the rural and Appalachian South home. Written with passion, clarity, and emotional honesty, the poems in Black Box illuminate profound experiences at the intersection of race, love, social justice, family, identity and place.Published in 2005 by Old Cove Press

Around the void left by the murder of Medgar Evers in 1963, the poems in this collection speak, unleashing the strong emotions both before and after the moment of assassination. Poems take on the voices of Evers's widow, Myrlie; his brother, Charles; his assassin, Byron De La Beckwith; and each of De La Beckwith's two wives.