Albery Allson Whitman (1851-1901), born the child of slaves in Kentucky, made his livelihood as a preacher in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He also produced a prodigious amount of poetry. Many of these works--replete with "mulatto" figures and vignettes about black, Native, and white subjects in the frontier spaces of the Midwest and Florida--prefigure current preoccupations in literary and cultural studies.

This collection includes selections from all of his major narrative poems, along with other poems, letters, and a sermon. By collecting and republishing these works--many of which have been out of print for more than a century--this volume restores Whitman's standing as one of the most important post-Civil War African American writers.