From the Stacks is a regular series on the Poetry Center Blog in which we solicit authors to wander our library and choose books that have been important to them and/or that they recommend.

Morgan Parker is the author of There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé and Other People’s Comfort Keeps Me Up at Night. In 2019, a third collection of poems, Magical Negro, will be published by Tin House, and a young adult novel will be published with Delacorte Press. Her debut book of nonfiction will be released in 2020 by OneWorld. Parker is the recipient of a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, winner of a Pushcart Prize, and a Cave Canem graduate fellow. She is the creator and host of Reparations, Live! at the Ace Hotel. With Tommy Pico, she co-curates the Poets with Attitude (PWA) reading series, and with Angel Nafis, she is The Other Black Girl Collective. She lives in Los Angeles.

Tommy “Teebs” Pico is a poet from the Viejas Indian reservation of the Kumeyaay nation, and currently lives in Brooklyn. He is author of the books IRL, Nature Poem, Junk, and myriad keen tweets. He co-curates the reading series Poets With Attitude (PWA) with Morgan Parker, co-hosts the podcast Food 4 Thot, and is a contributing editor at Literary Hub. @heyteebs

Morgan's selections From the Stacks are:

In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition by Fred Moten

Skies by Eileen Myles

Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine

The New Black by Evie Shockley

Cocktails by D.A. Powell

All My Pretty Ones by Anne Sexton

Chattanooga by Ishmael Reed

Hard Child by Natalie Shapero

The Peacock Poems by Shirley Williams

My New Job by Catherine Wagner

Shimmy Shimmy Shimmy Like My Sister Kate by Nikki Giovanni

You Are Not Dead by Wendy Xu

Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah by Patricia Smith

Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems by Alice Walker

Tommy's selections From the Stacks are:

You Da One by Jennif(f)er Tamayo

The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ondaatje

Vanishing Line by Jeffrey Yang

The Dream of a Common Language: Poems 1974-1977 by Adrienne Rich

New Poets of Native Nations edited by Heid E. Erdrich

Come On All You Ghosts by Matthew Zapruder

Passion: new poems, 1977-1980 by June Jordan

Elegies by Muriel Rukeyser

Garbage by A.R. Ammons

Hard Country by Sharon Doubaiago