CHAPTER ONE
“Grant Me a Voice, and Speaking Eyes”
CHAPTER TWO
Visionaries
CHAPTER THREE
A Light and Diplomatic Bird
CHAPTER FOUR
Hitting Her Stride
CHAPTER FIVE
A Pulitzer Is a Smile
CHAPTER SIX
Black Is Beautiful
CHAPTER SEVEN
A Surprised Queenhood
CHAPTER EIGHT
Journeys
CHAPTER NINE
Blacks
CHAPTER TEN
Immortality of a Kind
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
NOTES
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Angela Jackson is an award-winning poet, playwright, and novelist. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including the National Book Award-nominated And All These Roads Be Luminous- Poems Selected and New. Her novel Where I Must Go won the American Book Award in 2009. Its sequel, Roads, Where There Are No Roads, was published in 2017. Additionally, Jackson was longlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and a longlist finalist for the PEN Open Book Award for her 2015 poetry collection, It Seems Like a Mighty Long Time. Other honors include a Pushcart Prize, Academy of American Poets Prize, TriQuarterly's Daniel Curley Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Memorial Award. Jackson lives in Chicago.
“Jackson’s sensitive portrait of this ‘quiet genius’ and her finely
calibrated insights into her writing celebrate Brooks’s warmth, her
‘bitter bite, her slicing sarcasm,’ and the revolutionary
provocation and power of her courageous, caring, intricately
faceted poems, poems to read and reread for their emotional,
social, and moral repercussions—and for their expounding
beauty.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist, Starred Review
“[Jackson] provides criticism which situates Brooks’s poems in the
social and political conditions of her time. What emerges is a
portrait not just of a creative maverick, but also of an artist who
constantly negotiated her womanhood and strove to tell the stories
of ordinary black women.”
—The New Republic
“This book will be of special interest to scholars and students but
will also appeal to general readers who enjoy Brooks’s poetry and
want to know more about her.”
—Library Journal
“Angela Jackson’s new biography of Gwendolyn Brooks, A Surprised
Queenhood in the New Black Sun, does more than recount the iconic
poet’s life and legacy: It’s a lovingly written genealogy of Black
activism and art.”
—Bitch
“I love Gwen. She was a beacon to all of us. She was one of the
most gracious people I know. She was, in fact, a poem. . . smooth.
. . quiet. . . at a different level each time you saw the same
words. What a pleasure it is for me to have been permitted to call
her ‘friend.’ I know Angela Jackson, also, and am so pleased she is
the one to weave this quilt.”
—Nikki Giovanni
“Such generosity of vision and scholarship, A Surprised Queenhood
in the New Black Sun superbly contextualizes Gwendolyn Brooks’s
life as a sustaining artist who possessed an immense communal
spirit and served as a model of literary citizenship. Even more,
Angela Jackson fiercely celebrates Brooks as mentor and unwavering
light, one whose poetry was a lifeline and whose quiet deeds help
to empower generations of American writers.”
—Major Jackson, Richard A. Dennis University Distinguished
Professor, University of Vermont; author of Roll Deep: Poems
“Angela Jackson frames the life and work of Gwendolyn Brooks with
the attention and sensitivity perhaps only one poet can have for
another. One of the greatest American poets of the twentieth
century, Brooks had such a singular imagination that it would be
folly to read her poems simply as products of her life experiences.
And yet, we know Brooks drew inspiration for her work from people
in the community around her. In A Surprised Queenhood in the New
Black Sun, poet Angela Jackson has done something remarkable by
illuminating the life and times that nourished Ms. Brooks’s poems,
and doing so in a way that proves the poems all the more vital and
inventive. This is a remarkable achievement.”
—Gregory Pardlo, Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry
“Toni Morrison said we die, that may be the meaning of life, but we
do language, that may be the measure of our lives. And how Miss
Brooks did this thing called language. How she made us all look
down the corridors of our birth. How she wore the rhythm of her
name wide on green rivers of change. How she fashioned poems for us
all from this bamboo wilderness called America. How she moved from
city to city, restringing her words so we could live and breathe
and smile and breathe and love and breathe her. This Gwensister
called life.”
—Sonia Sanchez
Ask a Question About this Product More... |