Artist Diaries celebrates the Life and Works of Poet Countee Cullen 1903-1946: Celebrating Black History Month

Countee Cullen earned his MA at Harvard in 1926 and returned to New York where he became a teacher. Although he wrote and published works representing every genre of creative literature, Countee Cullen was essentially a poet.

He soon became the most well known author in the young group of writers known as the New Negro Renaissance. His poems appeared in Vanity Fair and Harper’s magazine. Cullen’s poetry was distinguished by its intensity, passion, and the frustrations from a religious perspective of the early Black American experience. Artist Diaries is proud to celebrate the life and works of poet Countee Cullen.



Incident

Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.

Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, "Nigger."

I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That's all that I remember.

-Countee Cullen