In a small room where the pen had the power to make every voice sing, young Black men and women gathered to share their writing, engage in provocative discussions of the world, and collaborate to pen their souls. Uniquely situated in time between the naturalistic protest poetry and the Black Arts Movement, the Umbra Poets were a community of readers and writers who gathered around to share their writing and offer and receive critical affirmation and valuable criticism. Their ultimate goal was to cultivate life-long writers who wrote with purpose and passion. Established in Manhattan's Lower East Side in 1961, The Umbra Poets' Workshop was a collection of young Black writers who served as predecessors to the Black Arts Movement. Umbra Poets wrote with a heightened sense of urgency. Some of poets became influential writers for Black artistic nationalism. These writers strived to inspire change through a landscape of politics and aesthetics. A few writers among these many notable artists were Thomas Dent, Calvin Hernton, and Lorenzo Thomas.

Thomas Dent, one of the leading founders of the Umbra Workshop, came to New York after serving a two-year stint in the United States Army. He was working as a public information director for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund when he helped form the Umbra Poets. Dent's early educational background is worth mentioning because it quite possibly mirrors the experiences of many young African American male adolescents in today's schools. He was taught in a public education system in which the voices of Black writers were invisible. The literary cannon he was exposed to in high school through college exuded writers such as Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Falkner while excluding even a trace of the Black literary tradition that included the works of W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, or James Weldon Johnson. With no recollection of ever hearing a consciously Black line of thought, comment, or reality in any of his courses, Dent expressed the belief that Black students like himself were being "prepared to 'belong' ... to become whites in brown skins by mastering white standards." (1) Instead of adhering to the standards of others, Dent felt that platforms needed to be established for Black writers to speak their truths and tell their stories. With this realization, Dent and other former members of a 1960s Black nationalist literary organization, On Guard for Freedom, established a writing collaborative that would be named the Umbra Poets. The group was named Umbra, meaning "shade" in Latin, after the term, "penumbra" which was written in a poem titled, The Poet Talks to a Face and the Face Talks Back, penned by Umbra member, Lloyd Addison.

The Umbra Poets' Workshop became a space created in the lives of Black writers to gather weekly and share and critique their poetry. These workshops would convene on Friday evenings at eight o'clock and last many times until one or two o'clock in the morning. Tom Dent hosted the first writing workshop in his apartment. Looking back on this experience, he...