Le roi est mort. Vive, vive le roi!

Sing high the welcome to the New Year’s morn!

Journalist, activist, speaker, educator and poet Alice Ruth Moore Dunbar-Nelson (July 19, 1875 – September 18, 1935) was a star of the Harlem Renaissance and celebrated citizen of her birthplace, New Orleans. Frank as she could safely be—and often very funny—she wrote and spoke publicly about her issues of gender, class, and color, most famously in the autobiographical Brass Ankles. Her poems and essays appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier, Ebony, and Topaz, the journal of the NAACP. “New Year’s Day” was collected in Violets and Other Tales, for which Dunbar-Nelson (writing as Alice Ruth Moore) provided the following introduction:

In this day when the world is fairly teeming with books,—good books, books written with a motive, books inculcating morals, books teaching lessons,—it seems almost a piece of presumption too great for endurance to foist another upon the market. There is scarcely room in the literary world for amateurs and maiden efforts; the very worthiest are sometimes poorly repaid for their best efforts. Yet, another one is offered the public, a maiden effort,—a little thing with absolutely nothing to commend it, that seeks to do nothing more than amuse.

Many of these sketches and verses have appeared in print before, in newspapers and a magazine or two; many are seeing the light of day for the first time. If perchance this collection of idle thoughts may serve to while away an hour or two, or lift for a brief space the load of care from someone’s mind, their purpose has been served—the author is satisfied.