When a poet and a scholar find that they both share a love for Gwendolyn Brooks, who in 1950 became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and get asked to write a paper on it, they contemplate how to begin. Each is drawn to Brooks for different reasons. For the poet, Brooks is a predecessor and an inspiration, verifying her sense that Eurocentric accentual-syllabic forms and black American life experiences can be brought together to manifest beautiful verse. For the scholar, Brooks is a kind of puzzle—what is she saying, especially in her more difficult poems? And what are the implications for literature? Can the poet and the scholar find a way to articulate separate adorations for Brooks and simultaneously write something that speaks to the common man?
Author: celeste doaks and Karl Henzy
Poet and journalist celeste doaks is the author of Cornrows and Cornfields (Wrecking Ball Press, UK, 2015). She is also the editor of, and contributor in, the poetry anthology Not Without Our Laughter: Poems of Humor, Joy, and Sexuality (Mason Jar Press, 2017). Her newest poems can be found in the Misrepresented People: Poetic Responses to Trump’s America Anthology (New York Quarterly, 2018). She is University of Delaware’s Visiting Assistant Professor in Creative Writing for 2017-2019, and the recipient of a 2017 Rubys Literary Arts Grant Award. For more visit www.doaksgirl.com or check out the podcast she co-hosts with Anthony Moll called Lit!Pop!Bang! doaks is married to scholar Karl Henzy.
Dr. Karl Henzy grew up in southeastern Connecticut and earned his B.A. and M.A. from the University of Connecticut. Henzy received his Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Delaware in 1993. That same year, he joined the faculty of Morgan State University in Baltimore, and after 25 years in Maryland’s largest city, he considers himself a transplanted Baltimorean. Henzy has published in The Chronicle for Higher Education, Callaloo, and The D.H. Lawrence Review, among other venues. He has written on modernism, interconnections between literature and classical music, D.H. Lawrence, the Harlem Renaissance, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison, among others. He is married to poet celeste doaks.