We Real Cool

“Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks In Form: An Interview with Peter Kahn” by Dora Malech (2017)

Peter Kahn is one of the editors of The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks, and in this interview, Dora Malech of The Kenyon Review asks Kahn about the original ideas behind the creation of the anthology. Kahn reveals his personal connection to the works of Gwendolyn Brooks and his experiences teaching Brooks’s poetry to his high school students. A poet himself, Kahn’s work has been published in numerous literary journals, and he is a founder of the poetry collective based in London called Malika’s Kitchen

“Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks” from the Pulitzer files

Brooks was the first Black American author to win the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, and this article on the Pulitzer Prize website describes the events that led to Brooks winning the prize in 1950. The article begins with a lengthy quote from Richard Wright, her fellow writer and member of the Chicago Literary Renaissance movement, in which he celebrates Brooks’s “faithful” renditions of Black American life. A letter also appears in the article, written by Henry S. Canby, who represented the Pulitzer committee; the letter outlines the process by which the committee came to determine that Brooks was the winner.

“Remembering the Great Gwendolyn Brooks at 100” by Karen Grigsby Bates (2017)

This tribute, transcribed here in article form, to Gwendolyn Brooks on NPR’s Morning Edition radio program memorializes the poet’s life, work, and reputation for kindness shortly before what would have been her 100th birthday. The tribute brings to life the moment at which Brooks learns that she has won the Pulitzer Prize; when the photographers arrived at her home, they found it dark as “money was tight, and the bill hadn’t been paid.”

“Searching for Gwendolyn Brooks” by Bernard Ferguson (2021)

In this article in The Paris Review, poet Bernard Ferguson celebrates his discovery of an obscure poem by Gwendolyn Brooks titled “To the Young That Want to Die.” For Ferguson, who has a deep and personal connection to the works of Brooks, this poem is “a banger: it’s a powerhouse, a marvel, a jewel.” In the article, Ferguson describes the extensive research he completed to learn more about the biographical context of the poem and the incident(s) that may have inspired Brooks to write such a moving piece about death and the importance of patience. Ferguson deduces that the year in which Brooks wrote the poem was 1985, acknowledging that his discovery enables him to understand the poem, somewhat ironically, as truly timeless.

We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity by Publisher’s Weekly (2003)

This book review of bell hooks’s nonfiction book appears on the Publisher’s Weekly website. The title of the book is a direct allusion to Brooks’s poem, drawing attention to hooks’s exploration of what she views as some of the problematic aspects of Black masculinity. In this book, hooks “unpacks the explosive contents” of Brooks’s poem, inviting readers to understand that Black men have been taught to live according to values like violence and aggression and that they themselves are suspicious of acts of love.