AMBER ROSE JOHNSON: In the face of this title, African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (Library of America, $45), you’re intentionally widening the geographic and aesthetic scope. It’s much more diasporic than “African American” might seem to suggest. And you have prose, songs, epics, formally constrained poems, poems that make us question what poetry can be, and look like, and do. What was your approach to the scale and scope of this anthology?

KEVIN YOUNG: The African diaspora is so rich and important, yet I couldn’t call it “Black Poetry” because that would be worldwide, and