Gwendolyn Brooks Centenary Tribute

A panel of writers–including Cornelius Eady, Rashidah Ismaili, D. Nurkse, Camille Rankine and Safiya Sinclair–celebrates the centenary of one of America’s greatest poets, Gwendolyn Brooks.

Cornelius Eady is the author of Hardheaded Weather (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2008) and the recipient of the Prairie Schooner Strousse Award, a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Rockefeller Foundation. Rashidah Ismaili‘s collections include Cantata for Jimmy (2004) and she has taught at Wilkes University and Rutgers University and has served as the associate director of the Pratt Institute Higher Education Opportunity Program and as vice president of Pen & Brush, an arts organization for women; D. Nurkse is the author of numerous collections of poetry, including Love in the Last Days: After Tristan and Iseult (2017) and is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the Bess Hokin Prize from Poetry, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and a Tanne Foundation Award. Camille Rankine is the author of Incorrect Merciful Impulses, published in 2016 by Copper Canyon Press, and the recipient of a 2010 “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize. And Safiya Sinclair is the author of Cannibal (University of Nebraska Press, 2016), winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Addison M. Metcalf Award, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Poetry, the Phillis Wheatley Book Award, and the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry.

Co-sponsored by Poetry Society of America.