Women Poets at Barnard: A Centennial Celebration of Gwendolyn Brooks

A major American poet of the twentieth century, Gwendolyn Brooks is a writer of great formal mastery and intimate observation, most beautifully of the Chicago communities she writes of, the people who make “a sugar of/The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.” The author of twenty separate volumes of poetry, including the celebrated A Street in Bronzeville (1945), the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen (1949), and In the Mecca (1968), as well as the experimental novel Maude Martha (1953) and other volumes of prose and collected verse, Brooks is a writer who “managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young black militant writers of the 1960s” (George E. Kent). In her work, “Brooks never feared or shirked what she fervently believed was her responsibility; that sense of responsibility shaped her very aesthetic. Few poets walk with such integrity” (Elizabeth Alexander).

Featuring Jericho Brown, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Darryl Pinckney, and others.

Presented as a part of Our Miss Brooks 100 with the Poetry Society of America, the Barnard Center for Research on Women, and the Columbia Heyman Center for the Humanities.