This year marks the 75th anniversary of the publication of Gwendolyn Brooks’s Annie Allen, the poetry collection that won the first Pulitzer Prize by a Black author. Our new exhibit celebrates Brooks’s achievements in the history of Black American letters by tying together notable first editions of Black writing from the 18th and 19th centuries to the anthologies of the 20th and 21st, illustrating the emergence of rich and creative Black literature into the mainstream. Material highlights include Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Alain Locke’s The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), and Brooks’s own manuscripts.
Special guest speaker Nora Brooks Blakely will discuss her mother’s legacy during the exhibit opening. This event is open to the public, refreshments will be served, and advance copies of the new edition of Annie Allen will available for purchase.
The exhibit, “We are each other’s harvest” : Gwendolyn Brooks and the Formation of Black Literary Canon, will continue to be on display in the RBML through May 2025.
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