A look back at the cultural and political force of Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, in celebration of her hundredth birthday Artist–Rebel–Pioneer Pulitzer-Prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the great American literary icons of the twentieth century, a protégé of Langston Hughes and mentor to a generation of poets, including Sonia Sanchez, Nikki Giovanni, and Elizabeth Alexander. Her poetry took inspiration from the complex portraits of black American life she observed growing up on Chicago’s Southside—a world of kitchenette apartments and vibrant streets. From the desk in her bedroom, as a child she filled countless notebooks with poetry, encouraged by the likes of Hughes and affirmed by Richard Wright, who called her work “raw and real.” Over the next sixty years, Brooks’s poetry served as witness to the stark realities of urban life: the evils of lynching, the murders of Emmett Till and Malcolm X, the revolutionary effects of the civil rights movement, and the burgeoning power of the Black Arts Movement. Critical acclaim and the distinction in 1950 as the first black person ever awarded a Pulitzer Prize helped solidify Brooks as a unique and powerful voice. Now, in A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun, fellow Chicagoan and award-winning writer Angela Jackson delves deep into the rich fabric of Brooks’s work and world. Granted unprecedented access to Brooks’s family, personal papers, and writing community, Jackson traces the literary arc of this artist’s long career and gives context for the world in which Brooks wrote and published her work. It is a powerfully intimate look at a once-in-a-lifetime talent up close, using forty-three of Brooks’s most soul-stirring poems as a guide. From trying to fit in at school (“Forgive and Forget”), to loving her physical self (“To Those of My Sisters Who Kept Their Naturals”), to marriage and motherhood (“Maud Martha”), to young men on her block (“We Real Cool”), to breaking history (“Medgar Evers”), to newfound acceptance from her community and her elevation to a “surprising queenhood” (“The Wall”), Brooks lived life through her work. Jackson deftly unpacks it all for both longtime admirers of Brooks and newcomers curious about her interior life. A Surprised Queenhood in the New Black Sun is a commemoration of a writer who negotiated black womanhood and incomparable brilliance with a changing, restless world—an artistic maverick way ahead of her time.

In Revolutionary Poetics, Sarah RudeWalker details the specific ways that the Black Arts Movement (BAM) achieved its revolutionary goals through rhetorical poetics—in what forms, to what audiences, and to what effect. BAM has had far-reaching influence, particularly in developments in positive conceptions of Blackness, in the valorization of Black language practices and its subsequent effects on educational policy, in establishing a legacy of populist dissemination of African American vernacular culture, and in setting the groundwork for important considerations of the aesthetic intersections of race with gender and sexuality. These legacies stand as the movement’s primary—and largely unacknowledged—successes, and they provide significant lessons for navigating our current political moment. RudeWalker presents rhetorical readings of the work of BAM poets (including, among others, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Margaret Burroughs, Sarah Webster Fabio, Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Haki Madhubuti, Carolyn Rodgers, Sonia Sanchez, and the Last Poets) in order to demonstrate the various strands of rhetorical influence that contributed to the Black Arts project and the significant legacies these writers left behind. Her investigation of the rhetorical impact of Black Arts poetry allows her to deal realistically with the movement’s problematic aspects, while still devoting thoughtful scholarly attention to the successful legacy of BAM writers and the ways their work can continue to shape contemporary rhetorical activism.

Presents more than eighty poems spanning the career of twentieth-century African-American poet Gwendolyn Brooks, which explore life on Chicago's south side.

This was the Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. "I was to be a Watchful Eye; a Tuned Ear; a Super-reporter," Brooks said. "I began writing about whatever I thought I knew, whatever I experienced." What she knew and experienced in those years resulted in poetry charged with a new power and urgency. The book takes its title from a long narrative poem set in a huge decayed apartment house in Chicago's black ghetto, a building called the Mecca. A tragedy in the Mecca gives rise to Brooks' extraordinary poetic evocation of its dense personal miseries and sense of life. Nine shorter poems follow, and these too, in large part, have their source in contemporary figures and circumstances: Medgar Evers and Malcolm X, "the Blackstone Rangers gang," the astonishing prideful mural painted on a ghetto wall one summer. The universality that transcends the immediate event, and is the mark of poetic sensibility, distinguishes all the poetry here. Gwendolyn Brooks' stature as a poet who "induces almost unbearable excitement"--As Phyllis McGinley described her--is here enriched by the new dimensions her work encompasses.--Adapted from book jacket.

The Routledge Reader of African American Rhetoric is a comprehensive compendium of primary texts that is designed for use by students, teachers, and scholars of rhetoric and for the general public interested in the history of African American communication. The volume and its companion website include dialogues, creative works, essays, folklore, music, interviews, news stories, raps, videos, and speeches that are performed or written by African Americans. Both the book as a whole and the various selections in it speak directly to the artistic, cultural, economic, gendered, social, and political condition of African Americans from the enslavement period in America to the present, as well as to the Black Diaspora.

Presents a collection of the author's poetry and prose.

This provocative study of the lives and works of Emily Dickinson, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Gwendolyn Brooks focuses on the historical struggles and differences among and within women writers and among feminists themselves. Erkkila explores the troubled relations women writers experienced with both masculine and feminine literary cultures, arguing that popular feminist views often romanticize and maternalize women writers and their interrelations in ways that effectively reinforce the very gender stereotypes and polarities which initially grounded women's oppression. Studying the multiple race, class, ethnic, cultural, and other locations of women within a particular social field, Erkkila offers a revisionary model of women's literary history that challenges recent feminist theory and practice along with many of our fundamental assumptions about the woman writer, women's writing, and women's literary history. In contrast to the tendency of earlier feminists to heroize literary foremothers and communities of women, Erkkila focuses on the historical struggles and conflicts that make up the history of women poets. Without discounting the historical power of sisterhood, she seeks to reclaim women's literary history as a site of contention, contingency, and ongoing struggle, rather than a separate space of untroubled and essentially cooperative accord among women. Encompassing the various historical significations of "wickedness" as destructive, powerful, playful, witty, mischievous, and not righteous, The Wicked Sisters explores the power struggles and discord that mark both the history of women poets and the history of feminist criticism.