This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems - Softcover

Walker, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820345970 ISBN 13: 9780820345970

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2013

Synopsis

Margaret Walker became the first African American to win a national literary award when her collection For My People was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942. Over the next fifty years she enriched American literature in endless ways through her writings and, in 1993, she received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

This Is My Century is Walker's own defining summation of her career. Selected by the author herself, the one hundred poems include thirty-seven previously uncollected pieces and the entire contents of three hard-to-find volumes: the award-winning For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day (1970), and October Journey (1975).

About this title

About the Author

MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998) wrote poetry, essays, the novel Jubilee, and a biography of Richard Wright. She created pioneering programs in the humanities and African American studies at Jackson State University, where she was a faculty member for almost three decades.

From Library Journal

From the opening lines of For My People (winner of the 1942 Yale Younger Poets award) to the last of a recently written group of poems titled "Farish Street," Walker writes with a strength and clarity that befits her large vision of American and African American history. She assumes the role of spokesperson and in the service of that role employs a multitude of techniques and inspirations: folklore, scriptural rhythms, ballad meter, sonnet forms, the Egyptian deities, political rhetoric. In planting her "seeds of dreams and visions and prophecies . . . fantasies of freedom and of pride," the poet weaves personal memories and experiences within the larger fabric of racial identity, thereby enriching it.
- Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0820345970
• ISBN 13: 9780820345970
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256