Knees of a Natural Man: The Selected Poetry of Henry Dumas

Author: Henry Dumas

Publisher: Flood Editions (2020)

Edited and with an introduction by Eugene B. Redmond.

Henry Dumas (1934–1968) was born in Sweet Home, Arkansas, and moved to Harlem at the age of ten. He graduated from City College in New York before a stint in the U.S. Air Force. He was stationed on the Arabian Peninsula (which piqued his abiding interest in Arabic culture) and in San Antonio, Texas. Following discharge, Dumas attended Rutgers University, worked for a year at IBM, and taught at Southern Illinois University’s Experiment in Higher Education in East St. Louis. An editor, supporter of, and contributor to numerous small magazines, Dumas was also active in the Civil Rights Movement and a seminal force in the Black Arts Movement. Dumas was shot and killed by a New York City Transit policeman in the subway.

"His work remains––a testimonial to his own committed love, his own sharp perceptiveness and zeal."

–Gwendolyn Brooks

"In 1968, a young Black man, Henry Dumas, went through a turnstile at a New York City subway station. A transit cop shot him in the chest and killed him. Circumstances surrounding his death remain unclear. Before that happened, however, he had written some of the most beautiful, moving, and profound poetry and fiction that I have ever in my life read. He was thirty-three years old when he was killed, but in those thirty-three years, he had completed work, the quality and quantity of which are almost never achieved in several lifetimes. He was brilliant. He was magnetic, and he was an incredible artist."

–Toni Morrison