Fifty white students and fifty black students from the eleventh and twelfth grades were asked to rank in order of their preference ten poems written by black and white authors, each accompanied by the author's name and a picture depicting his race to determine whether knowledge of an author's race acted as a determinant of the literary preferences and rejections of urban high school students. The rankings were compared to those of a randomly selected peer-judge group who also ranked the poems by preference, but without knowledge of any author's name or race. An analysis of the data revealed a significant difference in the way the races responded to the poems, with black students ranking higher poems written by black authors and white students ranking higher poems written by white authors. There was no significant difference in the way male and female subjects of respective races rated the poems or in the effect the two variables had on each other. (Author/HS)