Monday Muse: 'We Real Cool' (Video)

This year marks the centennial of the birth of the highly influential poet Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 - December 3, 2000). Adding to the many other forms of recognition of the centennial is the charming video below, produced by the Poetry Foundation. From Manual Cinema in association with Crescendo Literary, the video uses paper-cut puppetry to imagine what inspired Brooks to write her famous poem "We Real Cool". The story is by Eve Ewing and Nate Marshall and the music by Jamila Woods and Ayanna Woods; the director is Drew Dir of Manual Cinema.

Commissioned by the Poetry Foundation for the centenary is a live, staged production of No Blue Memories: The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, by Eve L. Ewing and Nate Marshall; it premieres this November.

Gwendolyn Brooks Profiles at Academy of American Poets, HarperCollins Publishers, Kansapedia (Kansas Historical Society), Library of Congress, Poetry Archive, The Poetry Center at Smith College, and  Poetry Foundation

Gwendolyn Brooks at Jacket 2

The Life of Gwendolyn Brooks, Louisiana Tech University

Gwendolyn Brooks Obituary (The New York Times)

Gwendolyn Brooks Page at Buffalo University, The Circles' Association

Gwendolyn Brooks Center, Chicago State University

Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center, Western Illinois University

Gwendolyn Brooks House, City of Chicago

Karen Grigsby Bates, "Remembering the Great Poet Gwendolyn Brooks at 100", NPR, May 29, 2017

Lillian-Yvonne Bertram, "'To find kisses pressed in books': One Hundred Years of Gwendolyn Brooks", Poetry Foundation

Chicago Public Library, "Gwendolyn Brooks: Chicago's Poet", June 1, 2017

Angela Jackson, "The Radical Poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, the First Black Author to Win a Pulitzer Prize", Alternet, June 4, 2017

Betsy Schlabach, "The Love Between Langton Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks", Black Perspectives (AAIHS), February 13, 2017

"Frost? Williams? No, Gwendolyn Brooks", The Pulitzer Prizes 

"Gwendolyn Brooks Made Poetry That Mattered", Legacy.com, 2011

Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith (Eds.), The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, January 2017)

Quraysh Ali Lansana and Sandra Jackson-Opoku (Eds.), Revise the Psalm: Work Celebrating the Writing of Gwendolyn Brooks (Curbside Splendor, January 2017)

Quraysh Ali Lansana and Georgia Popoff (Eds.), The Whiskey of Our Discontent: Gwendolyn Brooks as Conscience and Change Agent (Haymarket Books, Spring 2017)

Celebrating the Centenary of Gwendolyn Brooks (June 29, 2017)

Centennial Brooks - A Tribute Celebration, The University of Chicago (April 6-8, 2017)

Brooks Permissions's "The Centennial" (FaceBook)

Gwendolyn Brooks Centennial Poetry Prize, Furious Flower Poetry Center, James Madison University, Harrisonburg, Virginia

Gwendolyn Brooks Youth Poetry Awards, Illinois Humanities

Our Miss Brooks 100 (This is an excellent site.)