Misbehaving at the Crossroads, by Honorée Fanonne Jeffers (Harper). In this genre-blurring collection, which shifts between memoir, history, and poetry, Jeffers charts her place in a line of women whose lives have been shaped by slavery, racism, and resistance. Organized by the concept of the “crossroads,” a place of “difficulty and possibility,” Jeffers’s essays recall a range of formative experiences, from her first encounters with Alice Walker’s writing to a searing meeting with James Baldwin. Her disappointments with political figures, including Barack Obama and Kamala Harris, are tempered by insight into the challenges they faced; Harris, for instance, was “expected not only to be perfect but to transcend perfection.”

The Key to Everything, by Margaret A. Brucia (Princeton). The pioneering poet May Swenson arrived in New York in 1936, when she was twenty-three, anticipating a personal and creative flowering. She came from Utah, where she was born to Swedish immigrant parents, devout Mormons who raised their children in kind. Imaginative and ambitious, May left the church and her beloved family to pursue an artistically, politically, and sexually liberated life, eventually establishing herself as a unique figure in modern poetry. Brucia’s vibrant portrait, set against the mercurial backdrop of mid-century Manhattan, draws on Swenson’s diaries and her extensive correspondence with her fellow-poet Elizabeth Bishop to examine Swenson’s work with the Federal Writers’ Project; her romantic relationships, most of which involved women; and her cultivation of the playful, experimental literary style that would define her career.