TIME COVER - Amanda Gorman: A Conversation with Michelle Obama; The Black Renaissance by Ibram X. Kendi On Sale Friday, February 5 TIME journalists are available for interviews. ------------------------------------------- Today, TIME publishes ???The Black Renaissance,??? a special project, created in partnership with historian and author Ibram X. Kendi, that celebrates the power of Black art and marks this moment as the Black Renaissance. Kendi writes: ???In this first Black History Month after the racial reckoning of 2020, I feel impelled to do what historians rarely do: mark history while the story is still being written???. We are living in the time of a new ??renaissance???what we are calling the Black ??Renaissance???the third great cultural revival of Black Americans, after the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, after the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Black creators today were nurtured by these past cultural ??revivals???and all those brilliant creators who sustained Black Arts during the 1980s and 1990s. But if the Harlem Renaissance stirred Black people to see themselves, if the Black Arts Movement stirred Black people to love themselves, then the Black Renaissance is stirring Black people to be themselves. Totally. Unapologetically. Freely.??? http://bit.ly/3rmgy6t ++ See TIME???s new cover featuring Amanda Gorman: https://bit.ly/2NUQEIq --Cover credits: photograph by Awol Erizku for TIME taken on Jan. 29; fashion styling by Jason Bolden; makeup by Autumn Moultrie???The Wall Group; dress by Greta Constantine --PLUS: Watch a new video of Gorman reciting her poem, ???The Hill We Climb??? here: www.time.com/gorman TIME editor in chief and CEO Edward Felsenthal writes in his letter to readers: ???When historian, TIME 100 honoree and How to Be an Anti??racist author Ibram X. Kendi approached TIME with the idea to partner on a project about marking this moment as a Black cultural renaissance, the most challenging question we faced was how to choose which of the i