Now Sheba Sings The Song. by ANGELOU, Maya - 1987: With art by Tom Feelings.

New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987. First edition, first printing, of this collaboration between two of the most important artists of the African-American experience of the 20th century, inscribed by both Angelou and Feelings on the dedication page: "La Vonne, Joy! Maya Angelou, 2/88", with Feelings's subsequent inscription beneath "best wishes from Tom Feelings, April 1991".
Tom Feelings (1933-2003) was a prolific illustrator, and the first African-American artist to win a Caldecott Honour, first in 1972 for his book Moja Means One; Swahili Counting Book, and again in 1975 for Jambo Means Hello: Swahili Alphabet Book, both co-authored with his wife Muriel Feelings. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, and studied at the Cartoonists and Illustrators School, and in 1958 created a weekly comic strip, "Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History", which ran in The New York Age, a Harlem-based newspaper, which featured a boy educating himself about black history. The comic strip was a success but Feelings was unable to find further work, and he emigrated to Ghana in 1964 and worked as an illustrator at the Government Printing House, joining an African-American expatriate community that included Maya Angelou, then working as a journalist. He returned to the US in 1974 and found that the blossoming civil rights movement had changed the publishing industry immeasurably, and he became a household name among publishers of books aimed at black children. He illustrated 20 books and is best-known for The Middle Passage: White Ships/Black Cargo, which depicted life on the ships that brought slaves from Africa to America and won the 1996 Coretta Scott King Award. Feelings has since been celebrated for "his dedication to bringing awareness of racism and oppression to our youth. … His artistry, activism and educational mission has contributed to an historical context that is true to African Americans, the African Diaspora and to African experiences" (NYPL).
Now Sheba Sings the Song contains Feelings's collection of drawings of black women accompanied by verses by Maya Angelou. Feelings produced the drawings over a period of 25 years, with images of women from the US, Africa, South America, and the Caribbean. They remained unpublished until Feelings approached Maya Angelou: "I gave her the drawings to study, without asking or suggesting what she thought she might do. For half a year the drawings were in Maya's study, on the floor, on the walls, on chairs, and every ready surface. She was living with them now and finally one day…the wonderful poem was finished, and Maya Angelou had given these women their sound, their voices – to match their beauty" (Preface). Large octavo. Original brown cloth, titles to spine in bronze, black textured endpapers. With dust jacket. With 84 sepia-toned portraits by Tom Feelings. A couple of faint marks to cloth, gentle rubbing to bottom edge, contents clean, a near-fine copy in the very good jacket, not price-clipped, spine sunned with slight bump and creasing to head, a couple of light scuffs to panels, tiny nick to fore edge of front panel.