Monday, April 19, 2010

Why Gwendolyn Brooks deserves a fan page contd.

Gwendolyn Brooks has been writing since the early years of her childhood and she deserves to be recognized for her work because she participated in many different youth organizations (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People for example) she also engaged in poetry readings and workshops at Chicago’s South Side Community. After her first book in 1945 (A Street In Bronzeville), 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. Gwendolyn also taught poetry at numerous institutions for higher learning, including Northeastern Illinois State College (now Northeastern Illinois University), the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the City College of the City University of New York. Gwendolyn Brooks, in short, takes her poetry to the people; she spent most of her time inspiring others to write by sponsoring writers’ workshops in Chicago and also poetry contests at prisons. A turning point in her career came in 1967 when she attended the Fisk University Second Black Writers’ Conference and decided to become more involved in the Black Arts movement. She became one of the most visible articulators of “the black aesthetic” (Ideologies and perspectives of art that center around Black culture and life). She was appointed poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and she had been more active than many other laureates. She had done a lot to bring poetry to the people through accessibility and public readings because she wanted the people to be apart of her poetry. She continued to test her works worth by reading and speaking in taverns, and other public places as well as in academic circles. She was named poetry consultant, meaning she gives one advice, in 1985 by the Library of Congress. In 1990, Chicago State University gave Gwendolyn Brooks work a permanent home by establishing the Gwendolyn Brooks Center on its campus. Some unforgettable characters that are drawn from the underclass of the nation’s black neighborhoods mark Brooks’s poetry.

- Crystal Kelsey

1 comment:

  1. Crystal, it would have been nice if you included the works cited for this. A lot of great information and a wonderful way to start your blog.

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