1950 Poetry winner Gwendolyn Brooks (left) signs one of her books for Zisca Burton following a 1993 reception. (Gabrielle Speaks/University of Wisconsin Libraries)
Over the course of a six-decade career, poet and teacher Gwendolyn Brooks became an artistic lodestar at a key inflection point in mid-century America. Mentored as a teenaged prodigy by James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes, Brooks was named the first Black winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1950 (for the semi-autobiographical "Annie Allen," her second collection of verse) before enjoying a luminous career teaching at a variety of institutions, including Columbia University and several schools in her beloved hometown of Chicago.
Committed to an egalitarian poetics that drew from traditional forms and blues rhythms alike, Brooks chronicled the dreams and vicissitudes of the Black working class, evoking a populist elan shared by such Chicago-based Pulitzer winners as Carl Sandburg and Studs Terkel. The emergence of the Black Arts Movement in the late 1960s cast Brooks as a progenitor of a stylistic vanguard that encompassed such disparate figures as Amiri Baraka, Audre Lorde and Dudley Randall, whose Broadside Press published four of her works between 1969 and 1972. (Brooks elected to donate all of her royalties from “Riot” (1969) to the pioneering Black-owned press, partially enabling it to emerge as an important publisher for other Black writers; it remains active today as Broadside Lotus Press.)
Her continued importance was exemplified by a lifelong appointment as Poet Laureate of Illinois, a consultancy at the Library of Congress (presaging her later appointment as U.S. Poet Laureate in 1985) and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. By the time of her death in 2000, Brooks had received more than 50 honorary doctorates and was characterized by Mel Watkins of The New York Times as "one of America's most respected literary figures."
"Gwendolyn Brooks: A Poet’s Work In Community," a major new retrospective (January 28-June 5, 2022) at New York's Morgan Library, recasts her work through its manifold sociopolitical impact. Foregrounding materials bequeathed to the Morgan by the estate of politician and radio magnate Carter Burden after his death in 1996 alongside 2020 acquisitions from Brooks's personal library, the exhibition highlights more than forty manuscripts, broadsides, and first editions, ranging from the landmark "Annie Allen" to "Riot." Other materials in the exhibition include a selection of Brooks' children's books and self-published guides for younger poets.
"Gwendolyn Brooks’s legacy and impact on other artists are deeper than many realize," said Nicholas Caldwell, the Morgan’s Belle da Costa Greene Curatorial Fellow, in a press release announcing the exhibition. "These relationships are tied together by her powerful use of language, her deep empathy, and her incredible imagination, and it was an honor to explore these characteristics in the exhibition."
Read more about the exhibition here.
Related
The jury report recommending "Annie Allen" was previously published as part of our centennial in 2016.