In January 2026, Jasmine Mans ’15 did something that her undergraduate incarnation had barely dared to dream of: she shared a byline with Langston Hughes.
Mans, a poet who came to the UW as part of the First Wave Hip-Hop [ES1] [JA2] and Urban Arts program, studied Hughes in her courses, writing papers about his poetry and about the Harlem Renaissance. But she never expected the opportunity to add to one of his books. This month, the Hachette Group published a new edition of Hughes’s 1930 novel Not Without Laughter, with Mans writing the introduction.
“It was a beautiful, surreal opportunity,” she says. “I’ve always wanted to be not only a poet but a Black poet. I wanted to specifically write about the Black experience. And that came from my studies of Langston Hughes and the scholarly decisions that I made at the University of Wisconsin.”
Mans had been exploring poetry since her youth, when she took part in Urban Word NYC, and at the UW where she began to fully explore the power of spoken word.
“Spoken word isn’t just language. It’s performance, how you speak, how you use your hand, how you pause. It’s how you color language,” she says. “The written word has been institutionalized in a way that spoken word, as an art form, hasn’t. It’s for artists who need to perform, who need the stage. The poem exists in their body because they practiced the theater of the art.”
Hughes was a pioneer among 20th-century spoken word poets, with his lines epitomizing the mood and feel of jazz music, and he was a leader of the Harlem Renaissance literary movement. Mans, who grew up in New York, is well aware that she’s following in his path. After graduating, she performed with a poetry collective called The Strivers Row, named for a neighborhood that was a center of artistic activity during the Harlem Renaissance.
She also put together her first book, Black Girl, Call Home, which was published to great acclaim. In 2027, Mans will publish two more books, a second poetry collection and a set of essays called Good Weed Good Women, looking at the connections of women and cannabis. But the Hughes book is a special opportunity.
“I’m contributing to the Black literary canon,” Mans says. “That was something I wanted to do. I’m proud that my work is vibrating in the direction that I wanted it to go.”
