Gwendolyn Brooks Quotes (1917-2000)

“Sandra Cisneros is one of the most brilliant of today's young writers. Her work is sensitive, alert, nuanceful. It is rich with music and picture."”

“Until the publication of Brooks's Maud Martha, only Zora Neale Hurston had populated her fiction and folklore with ordinary people. Hurston's works, however, were southern and rural, and although they have been vastly important in the development of a literary self-portraiture of Afro-American women, it was Brooks's novel (and poetry) that launched a genre embedded in northern, urban, ghetto experience which encouraged the subsequent works of Paule Marshall, Ann Petry, and Alice Childress, among many others...For many Brooks's works in general, and Maud Martha in particular, were a touchstone, inscribing Black womanhood, as Paule Marshall once observed, "in all the wonder of her complexity." Maud Martha, published in 1953, presaged the literary outpouring by Black women since the early 1960s...The pioneering achievement of Gwendolyn Brooks's Maud Martha was that it offered a mirror, inviting Black women to look at themselves and their urban, working-class community through the eyes of one of their own. In its emphasis on relationship, in its attention to community, in its relentless probing of the consequences of racism, in its conjuring of the intimate through interior dialogue and the interior space of Maud Martha's home, Brooks's novel expressed precisely both a female sensibility and the wisdom and insight drawn from everyday life.”

“(At National Black Theater performance) I was in awe of the words I witnessed that day. It was the first time that I heard the works of writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Langston Hughes, Amiri Baraka. I heard poetry that was about me, that was very immediate. I connected to it in a visceral way. That experience moved me so profoundly that I went home and that night I wrote my first batch of poems. It was like the floodgates opened. That reading empowered me with a voice and gave me permission to express everything that had been festering in me for years. So I just started experimenting with language and writing all kinds of things.”

“When I read Jefferson's disparagement of Wheatley, it felt like he had been disparaging the entire lineage of Black poets who would follow her, myself included, and I saw a man who had not had a clear understanding of what love is...When Gwendolyn Brooks wrote about the children on the South Side of Chicago playing with one another in neighborhoods left neglected by the city, it was an act of love...”