Gwendolyn B. Bennett, a minor literary figure and graphic artist, is often mentioned almost in passing in association with other Harlem Renaissance writers whose reputations surpassed hers. Yet in the midst of the Harlem Renaissance Bennett was widely recognized by her peers as one of the more active and promising authors of the New Negro movement.

While only a small amount of Bennett's poetry was published and her work was never collected into a single volume, twenty-two of her poems appeared between 1923 and 1931, in black journals of the day such as Crisis, Opportunity, Palms, and Gypsy. Several poems were collected in major anthologies of the period: James Weldon Johnson's The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922), Countee Cullen's Caroling Dusk: An Anthology of Verse by Negro Poets (1927), and William Stanley Braithwaite's Anthology of Magazine Verse for 1927 and Yearbook of American Poetry (1927). Bennett also illustrated the front cover of Crisis...