The Music

Poetry collection by Everett Hoagland, winner of the 2023 American Book Award. The collection spans 50 years of the poet's work. Everett Hoagland was born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but has lived in New Bedford since 1973 where he was that city's first Poet Laureate, 1994-1998. He was a full-time educator for four decades and is Professor Emeritus at the nearby University of Massachusetts Dartmouth in North Dartmouth, Massachusetts where during his 30-year career there he created and sustained four different African American literature classes in addition to his poetry writing workshops.

"The passion of Everett Hoagland's social and historical consciousness match the skill of his lyrical command and the brilliance of his imagination." -- Clarence Major

"Everett Hoagland's ... is ... substantial poetry ... I commend the essential bravery of Hoagland's work, which connects the intimate and personal to the vastness of a historic and global outrage ... This is self-knowledge on an epic scale. All of us, regardless of our origins, would do well to come to grips with the long shadows of our own histories." -- Patrick Murfin

"(Hoagland's) poetry is as much for the ear as for the eye, as much for the stage as for the page ... While tones, diction, geography and subject vary, there is in (his) language the ring of the Beats, Black Mountain music, consciousness streaming, and rhyming in rapper style, the breath of the spoken poem, a speech that reveals a vast compassion." -- Walter Hess, AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW