By The Guild Literary Complex
The Guild Literary Complex, Third World Press and The American Writers’ Museum have joined together in organizing the first annual Brooksday at the Chicago Cultural Center.
A marathon reading of the works of Gwendolyn Brooks, Brooksday is a daylong celebration of the life and work of one of Chicago’s legendary literary figures.
We’ve invited more than 100 notable literary, civic, cultural and political leaders, along with students and teachers, to take the stage on June 7 from 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.
Readers will be reading a diverse selection of poems, along with selections from the novel Maud Martha.
Brooksday 2013 is the first step towards creating a citywide literary festival by 2017, Brooks’s 100th birthday.
Join us in commemoration of Gwendolyn Brooks’ artistic achievement, her legendary generosity toward other poets, her influence as a pathbreaking cultural figure, and her deserved stature as the iconic poet of modern Chicago.
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Bonus Beachwood material:
“Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in schools,” according to her Wikipedia entry.
“She attended Hyde Park High School, the leading white high school in the city, before transferring to the all-black Wendell Phillips. Brooks eventually attended an integrated school, Englewood High School. In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work.”
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“Gwendolyn Brooks was a highly regarded, much-honored poet, with the distinction of being the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize,” according to her Poetry Foundation bio.
“She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress – the first black woman to hold that position – and poet laureate of the State of Illinois.”
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“In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (published by Harper and Row), brought her instant critical acclaim,” according to her Oxford Companion To African-American Literature bio.
“She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine’s ‘Ten Young Women of the Year,’ she won her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time to the present, she has seen the recipient of a number of awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane Letters.
“President John Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962. In 1985 she was appointed poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Just as receiving a Pulitzer Prize for poetry marked a milestone in her career, so also did her selection by the National Endowment for the Humanities as the 1994 Jefferson Lecturer, the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.
“Her first teaching job was a poetry workshop at Columbia College (Chicago) in 1963. She went on to teach creative writing at a number of institutions including Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin.”
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“She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000,” according to her Academy of American Poets bio.
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A 1986 interview.
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Reading and discussing “We Real Cool.”
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NOTE: Gwendolyn Brooks College Prep is the Far South Side school involved the recent Payton Prep saga. It is not slated for closure.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on May 21, 2013