N[orman]. H. Pritchard contributed the typewriter, concrete and punctuation poems. Among the very first modern anthologies of newer African-American poetry, DICES OR BLACK BONES received the California Teachers of English Award for Best Anthology, 1970. This book was precedent setting in several ways. The editor was allowed to control the illustrator and thereby control the cover image, important at the time because so many contemporary publications then used lurid and often violent imagery to depict African-American experiences. DICES, instead, used art that expressed an African sensibility in keeping with the spirit of the movement-era of the early 1970s. The book premiered poetry by several of the younger Black writers who later became well-known: Al Young, Lucille Clifton, Ishmael Reed, Etheridge Knight, Victor Hernandez Cruz, David Henderson, Conyus, and Clarence Major, as well as many other writers deserving of attention. DICES challenged the prejudice there was no publishable Black poetry. Publishers had certainly not discovered it, and had not anticipated a market for it. Such thinking excluded Black voices from being heard in anthologies and kept them from potential readers. The book was unique in how it expressed the Afro-experience without extolling typical ideas of "Blackness," and instead focused on the variety and richness in African-American life in ways that had not been previously explored or chronicled. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.