16th Annual Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards
Guild Complex

The Guild Complex is pleased to announce the 16th anniversary of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards (GBOMA) for poetry.


07/14/09 - 07/14/09

730p


The Guild Complex is pleased to announce the 16th anniversary of the Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic Awards (GBOMA) for poetry.

Twenty semi-finalists will be selected from open submissions. These 20 poets will perform their work in front of an audience on Tuesday, July 14.

The Poets
Sheila A. Donovan
Katarzyna Jedeluk
Dred Sister Ren
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas
Billy Clem
Kim Ransom
Kate Duva
Ellen Wade Beals
Lamar Jorden Jorden
Amy David
Catherine Theis
Anne Godden-Segard
Al Klinger
Lina Chern
Emily Calvo
Lucia Blinn
Stepahnie Gentry-Fernandez
Patrick Gallagher
Grace Fondow
Steven Evans
Jamael Clark
Sharon Powell


About Gwendolyn Brooks – Wikipedia.com

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (7 June 1917 – 3 December 2000) was an American writer. She was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.[1] Although she was born in Topeka, Kansas, Brooks is "a Chicagoan." Her family moved to Chicago shortly after her birth, and despite her extensive travels and periods in some of the major universities of the country, she has remained associated with the city's South Side. What her strong family unit lacked in material wealth was made bearable by the wealth of human capital that resulted from warm interpersonal relationships.

In 1945 her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (published by Harper and Row), brought her instant critical acclaim. She was selected one of Mademoiselle magazine's "Ten Young Women of the Year," she won her first Guggenheim Fellowship, and she became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her second book of poems, Annie Allen (1949), won Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Gwendolyn Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. From that time to the present, she has seen the recipient of a number of awards, fellowships, and honorary degrees usually designated as Doctor of Humane Letters.

Gwendolyn Brooks was a prolific writer. In addition to individual poems, essays, and reviews that have appeared in numerous publications, she has issued a number of books in rapid succession, including Maud Martha (1953), Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956), and In the Mecca (1968). Her poetry moves from traditional forms including ballads, sonnets, variations of the Chaucerian and Spenserian stanzas as well as the rhythm of the blues to the most unrestricted free verse. In short, the popular forms of English poetry appear in her work; yet there is a strong sense of experimentation as she juxtaposes lyric, narrative, and dramatic poetic forms.

She was appointed poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and had been perhaps more active than many laureates. She had done much to bring poetry to the people through accessibility and public readings. Not only is she extremely active in the poetry workshop movement, but her classes and contests for young people are attempts to help inner-city children see "the poetry" in their lives. She has taught audiences that poetry is not some formal activity closed to all but the most perceptive. Rather, it is an art form within the reach and understanding of everybody—including the lowliest among us.

Director
Guild Complex

Tags: Literary, American, 2009