The poems are part of Maplewood’s Black Lives Matter Poetry Project—a rich assemblage of poems by American Black poets that are currently being installed throughout Maplewood’s shared spaces. In our business districts and pedestrian thoroughfares as well as parks, 38 poems printed on large banners will live among us during the coming months. As part of our public landscape, these poems are meant as points of reflection, to help us consider what it means to be free in the face of oppression. Poems by Langston Hughes, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Ross Gay, Audre Lorde, Lucille Clifton, Jericho Brown, Rita Dove, Tracy K. Smith, Elizabeth Alexander, Amanda Gorman, and other internationally acclaimed writers will hang next to the work of 13 vastly talented local poets, including teachers and students.