Naked Genius by George Moses Horton, The Colored Bard of North Carolina, consists of 132 poems written by George Moses Horton between the 1820s and 1865. It was published with the assistance of Captain Will H. S. Banks, an officer of the Union army that occupied Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in April 1865. "To honor his new sponsors, Horton wrote on President Lincoln, on Union Generals Grant and Sherman. There were patriotic poems, poems based on events in Lexington and Concord recently experienced, surrogate poems like "A Faint Description from the Plains of Michigan." Among the best ones are a few describing conditions in North Carolina immediately after the war. Yet the poems are remarkable mainly as evidence of the remarkable life and professional career of a Black poet whose "genius" would not be denied." - Richard Walser.
This is a 2022 reprint of the 1982 edition, and contains a facsimile of the original 1865 edition.
Paperback, 180 pages. Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2022