Rare Book & Manuscript Library

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. Her editors originally wanted her to cut several poems deemed too critical of white people, though she refused to do so. At the book's center is a 43-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": Brooks's use of the most ancient and the most postmodern of poetic forms foreshadows a career in which the poet's highest calling-to speak the truth-is forever entangled with the country's racial and sexual struggles and politics.

Content Warning and Statement on Language

This exhibit examines the history of Black American literature writ large and contains discussion of racism, racial slurs, slavery, and sexism as they pertain to the history and lived experiences of the Black community in the United States. Due to the historical nature of the materials included in the exhibit, many of them contain outdated or biased language used at the time of their creation, e.g. the word "Negro".

Gwendolyn Brooks showed preference for the term "Black" to describe persons of color of African descent as a form of reclamation, and therefore throughout this exhibit we use this terminology to discuss both texts and persons.

In congruence with the University Library's Sensitive Content Statement, the Rare Book & Manuscript Library condemns discrimination and hatred on any grounds, and seeks to accurately document our past, support learning about it, and affect change in the present by preserving, describing, and providing access to these materials.

"A writer is by definition a disturber of the peace." - James Baldwin

Acknowledgements

The Fall 2024 exhibit was curated by Cait Coker, Dana Miller, Chloe Ottenhoff, and Caroline Szylowicz. Design by Chloe Ottenhoff.

Special thanks are due to Ana D. Rodriguez, Marco Valladares-Perez, Rachael Johns, Tony Hynes, Lynne M. Thomas, and especially to Nora Brooks Blakely.

Exhibit banner image: From the Maud Martha Sequel Drafting Notebook by Gwendolyn Brooks. Gwendolyn Brooks Collection, Box 256, Folder 4.

Copyright  © 2024 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois & The Rare Book & Manuscript Library, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign