2016 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist for poetry
2017 PEN/Jean Stein Book Award finalist
2017 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award finalist
Named a top poetry book of spring 2016 by Library Journal
Part fact, part fiction, Tyehimba Jess's much anticipated second book weaves sonnet, song, and narrative to examine the lives of mostly unrecorded African American performers directly before and after the Civil War up to World War I. Olio is an effort to understand how they met, resisted, complicated, co-opted, and sometimes defeated attempts to minstrelize them.