LAST APRIL, KENDRICK Lamar won the Pulitzer Prize for music. That’s old news, but it’ll never get old to me: Black male rappers have been so maligned as to render his award almost unimaginable to those of us who have loved the music for decades. At the ceremony, the prize’s administrator, Dana Canedy, greeted Lamar on the steps of Columbia University. “We’re both making history right now,” she said. And so they were: Canedy is the first black woman to hold her post, and Lamar — or “Pulitzer Kenny,” as he now delightfully, and delightedly, calls himself — is the first hip-hop artist to win the award. On the same day, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins was nominated for the prize for drama (he was also nominated in 2016). Last spring, “Black Panther,” with its nearly all-black cast, surpassed a billion dollars in worldwide ticket sales. In May, Sean “Diddy” Combs outbid a rival to purchase a Kerry James Marshall painting for $21.1 million at Sotheby’s. The sale was a triumph: A black multimillionaire bought a black artist’s painting for the highest sum ever paid for the work of a living African-American artist.

What matters here, what’s more striking than the sums exchanged or the awards received, is the intense focus on works by African-American men in America’s artistic landscape, even as the problems of race and racial violence continue to plague the nation.

The last decade has seen a burgeoning multiplicity in America’s literature, with gifted black men writing novels, poems and plays of great import. Some of them have even come to the attention of the literary establishment. Here follows a woefully incomplete roll call: Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer, 2015. Colson Whitehead, National Book Award, 2016; Pulitzer, 2017. Tyehimba Jess, Pulitzer, 2017. Terrance Hayes, National Book Award, 2010. James McBride, National Book Award, 2013. Ross Gay, Danez Smith, Fred Moten and Yusef Komunyakaa, National Book Award finalists. The list goes on, and I have not touched on the writers who are not yet household names, whose arrival I await in the manner of James Baldwin’s loving anticipation of his nephew’s birth in his essay “A Letter to My Nephew” (1962), in which he wrote: “Here you were to be loved. To be loved … hard at once and forever to strengthen you against the loveless world.”

When I was 15, in 1988, a friend’s father gave me a copy of Sonia Sanchez’s “Under a Soprano Sky.” I didn’t know living black people wrote poetry. After, I read books by Gloria Naylor, Paule Marshall and Toni Cade Bambara as if my life depended on it. Here, I must confess to an unease with any gendered division of contemporary literature: When I was asked to consider the particularities of the current landscape, I wondered if a focus on male achievement might obscure the equally unprecedented successes of African-American women. And does that question undermine this extraordinary moment for black male writers? I have not found an answer that is entirely sufficient, but I do know that the work of black women writers presents a ferocious challenge to old sexist perceptions; as Griffin says, “the difference between this moment and others is that, in the past, to be a black writer was to be a man.” Robin Coste Lewis, Tracy K. Smith, Lynn Nottage, Jacqueline Woodson, Patricia Smith and Jesmyn Ward, to name just a few, disprove those old gendered ideas.

CONTEMPORARY AFRICAN-AMERICAN literature is formally sophisticated, irreducibly nuanced and highly individualized. The writers in these pages may be a cohort of sorts, yet their work is distinguished by a great variety of voices and aesthetics. And certainly our conversations about the current literature by black men ought to include as much consideration of how writers say things as what they’re saying.

The poet Claudia Rankine said of her 2016 MacArthur Fellowship that the prize was being awarded “to the subject of race.” Race may indeed be having “a moment,” and I can’t help but wonder if some gatekeepers expect black authors to focus primarily on racism and oppression. Pardlo has similar reservations about writing that might “pander to white fears and assumptions and resentments.” It’s an old, and valid, concern. Among his eight novels, Whitehead’s well-received “The Colossus of New York” (2003) is an ode to that city, and “Zone One” (2011) is a post-apocalyptic zombie novel that was nicely reviewed — yet it’s his book about slavery, “The Underground Railroad” (2016), that received such clamorous acclaim.

In the past, African-American writers carried two burdens: to prove our humanity to white readers while also fighting to be taken seriously as writers of so-called universal literature. Is, say, “The Brothers Karamazov” narrow or provincial because it’s about a few Russians in the 19th century? Certainly not, but black writers have been relentlessly sidelined for writing about black people. Groundbreakers like Morrison, in whose work blackness is a default, unapologetic and unexplained, radicalized the canon. Today’s black writers approach the subject of race, if they approach it at all, with greater freedom than ever before: Many writers today do handle the subject, obliquely or head-on. Some — Mat Johnson, Beatty, Everett — use satire to probe these depths. Contemporary black literature has a kind of boundlessness, topically and artistically.