[3] Although Danner stayed detached from Communism and would eventually oppose all radical politics, she participated in various South Side groups, including Inez Cunningham Stark's poetry workshop at the South Side Community Art Center, along with Gwendolyn Brooks and Margaret Goss Burroughs, her "sometime friends (and rivals).

She counted as friends the poet and critic Edward Bland, as well as Hoyt Fuller, who would head the revived Negro Digest (later Black World) beginning in 1951.

"[6] She aimed "to inject some strength" into her work and to train her naturally delicate style to carry forceful messages of African-American pride and racial equality, what she called "the social conscious"[7] Poems such as "Etta Moten's Attic" and "Africa, Drifting Through Me Sings" demonstrate Danner's growing passion for black African arts, cultures and peoples in the 1940s and 1950s.

She quickly became a part of the "Detroit Group," which included writers such as Danner, Dudley Randall, Oliver LaGrone, Woodie King, Jr., James Thompson and Naomi Long Madgett.

[4][13] The Boone House group also benefited from the attention of Rosey Pool, who included Danner and four other Detroit writers in her 1962 anthology Beyond the Blues.

[16][17] In 1962 Danner was noted as "a fellow Bahai" in October 1962 in the foreword of her poem Through the Varied Patterned Lace published in the Negro History Bulletin while she lived in Detroit.

[19] In 1966, Danner took her long-desired trip to Africa through the John Hay Whitney Fellowship to join prominent African-American cultural figures at the First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal.

"[25] During terms as poet-in-residence at Virginia Union University in Richmond and LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis, both historically black institutions, Danner continued her lifelong dedication to young people and edited two anthologies of students' verse.

Her work continued to draw upon African (as well as Western) art, flora and fauna, relationships with her fellow poets and scenes from urban life.

Her poetry, the result of a dialectic between voices of her past, present, and future, reveals her role and relation to a tradition of Western poetics; her artistic invention of poetry as a visual impression combines graphic social criticism and visual creation, that which is both didactic and mimetic, into an exciting synthesis of a new aesthetic; her verse makes her reader a viewer of art (synesthetic imagery) as well."

Erlene Stetson[29] "One can perceive between the two covers of this one crafted volume, in its full imaginative scope, the web of intricate and brilliant imagery her pen has spun forth in the journey of a sensitive, independent and compassionate spirit across these turbulent times in this uncertain place."