Zoom – Cait Coker on “We Are Each Other’s Harvest:” Gwendolyn Brooks and the Formation of the Black Literary Canon

December Midday Program

Presented by the Caxton Club and Chicago Collections Consortium

August 24, 1949: Annie Allen by Gwendolyn Brooks is published. It is her second volume of poetry, and readers admire and struggle with its technical forms, its atomizations, and critiques of racial life in Black America. At the book’s center is a forty-three-stanza poem called “The Anniad” in which Brooks’s titular heroine comes of age in epic verse, followed immediately by an “Appendix” of “leaves from a loose-leaf war diary.”

May 1, 1950: Annie Allen wins the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The book has never been reprinted. Until now.

Join us as Caxtonian Cait Coker explores Gwendolyn Brooks’s literary legacy and her place in American letters – and the exhibition currently on display at the University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign – on the seventy-fifth anniversary of the publication of Annie Allen.

Cait Coker is Associate Professor and Curator of Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. A scholar who focuses on the intersections of gender, genre, and publishing history, she is also Co-Editor of the Women in Book History Bibliography at womensbookhistory.org.

Register today.

Book purchase Registering for the program will allow you the opportunity to purchase copies of the seventy-fifth anniversary edition of Annie Allen for $32, including tax and shipping.

Preregistration required via website. Zoom presentation is free and open to all. Please forward this notice to anyone who may find it of interest.

Even if you can’t attend at the scheduled time, if you’re interested, please register. After the program, we’ll send an email to all registrants, asking if you’d like a link to the complete recording. That way you can see the program even if you couldn’t attend live, ran into technical issues, or simply wanted to watch it again.