Olio

Author: Tyehimba Jess

Publisher: Wave Books (2016)

Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry

Finalist for the PEN/Jean Stein Book Award

Finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award