Voices for Truth: Poet of the Month - Gwendolyn Brooks

Join us for our Voices for Truth series where we will be discussing the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American poet to win the Pulitzer Prize and the first African American woman to be Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position now called Poet Laureate. She is credited with bridging “the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young Black militant writers of the 1960s.”

Suggested reading: Gwendolyn Brooks: all selections free at www.poetryfoundation.org

“when you have forgotten Sunday: the love story” (written 1938; published 1945)

“the vacant lot” (written in the early 1940s; published 1945)

“kitchenette building” (1945)

“Sadie and Maud” (1945)

“the rites for Cousin Vit” (1949)

“We Real Cool” (1959)

“The Bean Eaters” (1959)

“The Lovers of the Poor” (1960)

“The Ballad of Rudolph Reed” (1963)

“The Sermon on the Warpland” (1968)

“The Blackstone Rangers” (1968)

“Riot” (1969)

“Primer for Blacks” (1980)

“Young Afrikans” (1987)

About the Facilitators:

• Dr. John Getz is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at Xavier University and has been volunteering for the Friends of Harriet Beecher Stowe House for many years.
• Zinnia Stewart (Zeda Stew), renouned Poet and Storyteller.

We’ll study the writings of many authors from the 19th and 20th centuries to determine

• how they discovered their voices,
• the forms they chose for expressing their voices,
• the needs both personal and societal to which they put those expressions,
• the effects their work had,
• how we can develop and enlist our own voices in service of our own values.

Harriet Beecher Stowe is our exemplar voice for truth. During her eighteen years in Cincinnati as a young adult (1832-1850), she discovered her voice as a writer, and in 1851, she decided to devote it to the anti-slavery cause. Horrified by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, she wrote to editor Gamaliel Bailey: "Up to this year I have always felt that I had no particular call to meddle with this subject [slavery], and I dreaded to expose even my own mind to the full force of its exciting power. But now I feel that the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak."The result, of course, was Uncle Tom's Cabin, the blockbuster novel that awakened many Northerners to the horrors of slavery and helped create the change of heart that would allow the Union to stand firm when the South ceded over slavery.

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Host or Publisher Harriet Beecher Stowe House