Helene Johnson poems

1972-1979

Helene Johnson was one a poet of the Harlem Renaissance. She was born in Boston, Massachusetts. She attended Boston University and Columbia University, the latter in in New York City in 1926. Johnson was the youngest of the African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance. She published approximately twenty-five poems which appeared in such magazines as Opportunity, Fire!!, and Vanity Fair, as well as in The New Negro. Her writings were mainly concerned with life in the ghetto and a strong identification with her racial heritage. The Helene Johnson poems consist of more than thirty unpublished and undated poems, with corrections and revisions by Johnson. There are also photocopies of articles which mention Johnson as a Harlem Renaissance poet: "Frank Horne and the Second Echelon Poets of the Harlem Renaissance" from Arna Bontemps's The Harlem Renaissance Remembered, 1972; "Propaganda and Aesthetics: The Literary Politics of Afro-American Magazines in the 20th Century", 1979; and "The Unpublished Poems of Helene Johnson.".