African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome

African American Poetry: Effie Lee Newsome | Heritage Mom

source: https://heritagemom.com/index.php/2020/02/21/african-american-poetry-effie-lee-newsome/

Effie Lee Newsome was one of the first African American poets who primarily published poems for children. She was the author of one volume of poetry, Gladiola Garden: Poems of Outdoors and Indoors for Second Grade Readers (The Associated Publishers, 1940), and she published numerous poems in the Crisis, Opportunity, and other leading journals of the Harlem Renaissance. She also edited the children's column "Little Page" in the Crisis. Her poems helped her young readers celebrate their own beauty and recognize themselves in fairy tales, folklore, and nature. [Source: Poets.org]

Though Newsome's volume of poetry targets second graders, I used it in Term 1 of this year with all of my children. I didn't discover the book until after a couple of my children were older, but the poems are so delightful that I didn't want them to finish school without hearing them.

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Gladiola Garden is out of print and very difficult to obtain. Updated October 2020: It has been reprinted by Living Book Press with a foreword written by yours truly! Yay!

At one point, a used copy was selling online for $2500 (bahahahahaha!), but now you can get a beautiful reprint of Gladiola Garden with all of the original illustrations.

I was able to find a digital copy on a public library site, but they loaded each and every page individually as a separate file (Who does that?). That is certainly not a pleasant way to read a book, so I cramped up my fingers over the summer with some hours of opening, copying, and pasting so I could have the complete volume in a single file. Although that makeshift copy served me well, I'm so glad to finally have a pretty copy that I can keep on our shelf and use for years to come.

Please enjoy one of the most precious volumes of poetry I've had the pleasure of sharing with my family...

You'll certainly have your own favorites, but my six-year-old used the poem below for poetry recitation, and there is nothing cuter than watching him recite this poem and then start giggling every single time. I'm not sure, but I think he may know a daddy who does similar things for his little boy from time to time.

Quoits*by Mary Effie Lee Newsome

In wintertime I have such funWhen I play quoits with father.I beat him almost every game.He never seems to bother.He looks at mother and just smiles.All this seems strange to me,For when he plays with grown-up folks,He beats them easily.

*Quoits is a ring toss game

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