Cait Coker on "We Are Each Other's Harvest:" Gwendolyn Brooks and the Formation of the Black Literary Canon 

Thursday, December 5, 2024
12:00 - 1:00 p.m. CST
This program will be held via Zoom webinar
Register TODAY
Free and open to all

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’ 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.

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.

This program is being held in partnership with the Caxton Club.