African American Women Writers

The Pulitzer Prize-winner's first new collection of poetry after a gap of nearly ten years. 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.

The only novel published by esteemed poet Gwendolyn Brooks. Initially entitled "American Family Brown" the work would eventually come to symbolize some of Brooks' most provocative writing. In a novel that captures the essence of Black life, Brooks recognizes the beauty and strength that lies within each of us.

Gwendolyn Brooks was one of the most accomplished and acclaimed poets of the last century, the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first black woman to serve as poetry consultant to the Library of Congress--the forerunner of the U.S. Poet Laureate. Here is her groundbreaking first book of poems, a searing portrait of Chicago's South Side.

The essays in this volume pay tribute to Gwendolyn Brooks's legacy. They explore Brooks's sustained dialectic with American historical events such as World War II and the Civil Rights movement, the cultural complexities of racial segregation, major movements in black letters such as the Black Arts movement, modernist ideas promoting individuality and exploring the feelings associated with loneliness, rejection of the status quo in society, open critique of history and its chroniclers, and revisions of traditional literary forms, such as the epic and the sonnet, as a means to incorporate a neglected black experience and contribution into American history and letters.

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.

A collection of thirty essays combining critical analysis and personal reflection, The Whiskey of Our Discontent, presents essential elements of Brooks' oeuvre--on race, gender, class, community, and poetic craft, while also examining her life as poet, reporter, mentor, sage, activist, and educator. "Gwendolyn Brooks wrote and performed her magnificent poetry for and about the Black people of Chicago, and yet it was also read with anguish, delight, and awe by white people, successive waves of immigrants, and ultimately the world.