The findings for the African American Poetry Tracker are based on a preliminary dataset of 175 anthologies, published between 1925 and 2020. The dataset includes approximately 80 publishers and more than 275 editors.
The anthologies in the dataset focus on African American, American, and multicultural literature. Only poems were tabulated for this project, though several of the anthologies contain short stories, essays, novel excerpts, and other writings. The Amiri Baraka, Nikki Giovanni, and Langston Hughes datasets have categories for poem titles, anthology titles, year of publication, decade of publication, publisher, editors, number of poems included, kind of anthology, and type of writing featured in the anthology.