The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks

Since she began publishing her tight lyrics of Chicago's South Side in the 1940s, Gwendolyn Brooks took her place as one of the most influential American poets of the twentieth century, distilling modernist style through the sounds and shapes of a variety of African-American forms and idioms. Now, Elizabeth Alexander, one of our leading experts on African-American literature and culture, presents a sweeping new selection of Brooks's poetry that moves from her earliest work-including many of her important World War II poems-through the social and aesthetic upheavals of the 1960s up to her death in 2000.

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.

Elizabeth Alexander, editor of this volume, is the author of four books of poems, including American Sublime, and the essay collection The Black Interior. She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation as well as the George Kent Award, given by Gwendolyn Brooks. She is a professor at Yale University.