Conversations With Gwendolyn Brooks

by Brooks, Gwendolyn

• ISBN13: 9781578065752
• ISBN10: 1578065755
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2003-12-01
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Mississippi

Summary

Literary Criticism -- Biography -->Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooksfeatures sparkling interviews with one of America's most valued poets. Throughout this book, which spans three decades, Brooks (1917-2000) speaks with simplicity, depth, candor, and passion about the making of a poem and about the position of the poet in humane society.A poem, she believed, comes from the heart. In each interview, she speaks from the heart and wins over the reader. The interviews took place in various settings-in radio recording studios and in university classrooms, in the coveted spotlight of a National Endowment for the Humanities celebration, and in the intimacy of her living room.Regardless of place or audience, Brooks speaks with humility. She was the first African American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and to receive other coveted honors, and yet she sees herself as "an ordinary human being who is impelled to write poetry."Brooks explains her experience within the creative process. She does not believe in a Muse. With gratitude to the Black Arts Movement, she celebrates both her blackness and the people in Bronzeville, the fictional community she created and whose lives she "put down" on paper.Including interviews conducted by Studs Terkel and poet Haki Madhubuti, among others,Conversations with Gwendolyn Brooksunderscores the legacy of one of the nation's most brilliant and humane poets.Gloria Wade Gayles is Eminent Scholar's Chair in Independent Study, Scholarship, and Service at Spelman College. She is the author of several books-including"My Soul Is a Witness": African American Women's SpiritualityandNo Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Gender in Black Women's Fiction.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
Chronology	xix
A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks
Studs Terkel	3	(10)
An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks
Paul Angle	13	(13)
Gwendolyn Brooks
Roy Newquist	26	(11)
An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks
George Stavros	37	(17)
"My People Are Black People"
Ida Lewis	54	(13)
Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks
Hoyt Fuller, Eugenia Collier, George Kent, Dudley Randall	67	(7)
Black Books Bulletin Interviews Gwen Brooks
Haki Madhubuti	74	(11)
Update on Part One: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks
Gloria T. Hull and Posey Gallagher	85	(19)
Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks
Claudia Tate	104	(7)
Interview
Gwendolyn Brooks	111	(6)
A Life Distilled: An Interview with Gwendolyn Brooks
Kevin Bezner	117	(8)
A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks
Alan Jabbour and Ethelbert Miller	125	(8)
Interviews with Gwendolyn Brooks
Rebekah Presson	133	(7)
A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks Susan
Elizabeth Howe and Jay Fox	140	(9)
Gwendolyn Brooks: Humanism and Heroism
D.H. Mehlem	149	(6)
A Conversation with Gwendolyn Brooks
Sheldon Hackney	155	(10)
Index	165