Emory Report
September 29, 2008
Volume 61, Number 6


 

   

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September
29, 2008
Explore Gwendolyn Brooks’ books

Throughout her work as a writer, teacher, and public champion of African Americans and black people worldwide in the quest for social justice, Gwendolyn Brooks strove to unify and advance disparate and often conflicting individuals and communities. Her dual commitment to celebrating both the commonalities and the differences among individuals is the theme of an exhibition on display in the Woodruff Library’s Concourse Gallery through Oct. 3.

“My Dreams, My Works” features 36 items from Brooks’ personal library, a significant portion of which MARBL acquired in 2006, adding to the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library.

The library, which amounts to 24 boxes of material, comprises works by writers from a variety of social and political spheres: hand-made cards by children whose school Brooks visited; books inscribed by Langston Hughes; ephemera from the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements; and closely-studied texts by canonical white authors. Such a mixture highlights that Brooks was a key influence among multiple literary movements, groups for social activism, and people of all ages and world views.

For information: http://web.library.emory.edu/libraries/schatten/.