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Claude McKay

Claude McKay (1890–1948) was a Jamaican-born poet and novelist at the centre of the Harlem Renaissance. He came to the United States as a student, then to New York, where his sonnet If We Must Die answered racial violence with a dignity that travelled far beyond the page. Harlem Shadows gathers lyrics of exile, desire, and Black life in the city — a voice both militant and musical, never content to be merely decorative.

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