Kitāb al-Aghānī by Abū al-Faraj al-Iṣfahānī (d. 356/967) contains biographical notices on two poets called Nuṣayb; the elder Nuṣayb is Nuṣayb b. Rabāḥ, the mawlā of the Umayyad caliph ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Marwān, and the younger one is Nuṣayb the mawlā of the Abbasid caliph al-Mahdī. Both Nuṣaybs were of African descent and were born into slavery in the Arabian Peninsula, and both bore the kunya Abū al-Ḥajnā’. The two Nuṣaybs, plus Abū Dulāma, are the Black poets who acted as court poets to caliphs who have left behind the largest number of surviving poems and biographical anecdotes. The elder Nuṣayb is a towering figure in Kitāb al-Aghānī; his poem about his beloved Zaynab is one of the Top 100 songs in Kitāb al-Aghānī, and his biographical notice tells of his efforts to free as many people as possible from slavery and of his conversations with colleagues, rivals, and lady loves. By contrast, the younger Nuṣayb’s notice tends simply to quote his poems with brief remarks about the occasions for them. The story of the younger Nuṣayb’s first meeting with his patron seems to allude to an analogous anecdote about the elder Nuṣayb. When the elder Nuṣayb was a young man, still enslaved in the Ḥijāz, some of the camels for which he was responsible got lost, and Nuṣayb traveled to Egypt to seek an audience with ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz b. Marwān. After much difficulty, Nuṣayb gained the patronage of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and thereafter lived a virtuous life. By contrast, al-Mahdī sent the younger Nuṣayb, who had recently become his mawlā, to Yemen to buy some camels, but Nuṣayb squandered the money on hedonistic pursuits. The second story seems to be a reworking of the first, contrasting the elder Nuṣayb’s earnestness with the younger Nuṣayb’s audacity, which is consistent with Abū al-Faraj’s views on Umayyad innocence and Abbasid decadence. Elsewhere in the biographical sources, al-Mahdī and al-Aṣmaʿī (d. 216/831) compare the younger Nuṣayb to the elder one. Modern scholarship has also focused on connecting the younger Nuṣayb to the elder one and to other Black poets, while ignoring other noteworthy aspects of the information available about him, such as his close relationship with the Barmakids and his support for the poetic career of his daughter al-Ḥajnā’.