Hi! For this week's Art and Fashion Spotlight, I'm going to be highlighting the Art half with a woman whose way with words netted her a very prestigious award. Authoring in general, whether it be fiction/non-fiction, poetry, journalism and even blogging at a lesser level, is a bit of an artform, especially depending on the person's way with words and the story they're trying to convey. In a world where tone, context and expression are everything when trying to get a point across, it takes real skill to pull at someone's heartstrings, make them use their imaginations and create an immersive world only by using one's words. It's literally your legacy, your voice, heart and eyes, in words. It's a gift. I would know, because God skipped over me on the day he gave those gifts out. LOL I keep trying though. 😂Today's entrant had that gift and then some, and her legacy lives on through her work and those who learned from her, who then go on to pass those lessons to others.
Name: Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917-2000
Profession: Poet, poet laureate
Why is the Spotlight on her today? For her written contributions to the literary world and the barriers she broke for other Black authors and poets
Notables:
--was the first Black author to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize
--was first published in 1930 in American Childhood Magazine
--was the first Black person to serve as the poetry consultant (or poet laureate) for the Library of Congress, where she served two terms
--held various classes and contests for children in her area to learn and understand poetry
--was selected by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1994 as the Jefferson Lecturer, the highest government honor for those in the humanities field
--was a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters
--was honored by Western Illinois University when they created the Gwendolyn Brooks Center for African-American Literature
--was personally invited by then-President JFK to read at a poetry festival held by the Library of Congress
--was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship
--won Poetry Magazine's Eunice Tietjens award after publishing her second book of poetry in 1949
--served as the poet laureate for Illinois
--later in her career, left the larger publishing houses, which were White run at the time, in favor of wanting to support Black publishing houses
--won a fellowship from the Academy of American Poets
--made a point to make racial awareness as they pertain to social issues a dominant theme in her work
--was named one of Mademoiselle's "Ten Young Women of the Year" in 1945, after publishing her first book of poetry
--was an adjunct staff member of the Chicago Defender
--was the first writer to read in Dudley Randall's Broadside Press's Poet's Theater Series when it originally opened and when it was later revamped after a new owner took over
--was posthumously honored and celebrated by over 300 poets in a collective book called "The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks," which was started by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar and Patricia Smith and inspired by Terrance Hayes
--helped support other poets through the Illinois Poets Laureate Awards and Significant Illinois Poets Awards programs, which she was a part of during her time as library consultant
--was honored with having a junior high school in Illinois named after her
Further reading links:
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5
Quote of the Day:
"I—who have ‘gone the gamut’ from an almost angry rejection of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new Black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new consciousness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress. I have hopes for myself. ... I know now that I am essentially an essential African, in occupancy here because of an indeed ‘peculiar’ institution. ... I know that Black fellow-feeling must be the Black man’s encyclopedic Primer. I know that the Black-and-white integration concept, which in the mind of some beaming early saint was a dainty spinning dream, has wound down to farce ... I know that the Black emphasis must be not against white but FOR Black. ... In the Conference-That-Counts, whose date may be 1980 or 2080 (woe betide the Fabric of Man if it is 2080), there will be no looking up nor looking down.”
--Gwendolyn Brooks
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