A chance encounter at a summer party on Martha's Vineyard blossomed into an improbable but enduring friendship between Simon and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. An intimate, vulnerable, and insightful portrait of the bond that grew between two iconic and starkly different American women, this work is a celebration of kinship in all its many forms.

Across a turbulent history, Black poets created a rich and multifaceted tradition that has been both a reckoning with American realities and an imaginative response to them. One of the great American art forms, African American poetry encompasses many kinds of verse: formal, experimental, vernacular, lyric, and protest. The anthology opens with moving testaments to the power of poetry as a means of self-assertion, as enslaved people voice their passionate...