News/Research

Grace Gipson on Gwendolyn Brooks in Black Perspectives

28 Nov, 2017

Grace Gipson on Gwendolyn Brooks in Black Perspectives

Pictured above: Gwendolyn Brooks at her typewriter from Getty Images.

Grace Gipson wrote a biography about the life and legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks for the African American Intellectual History Society: Black Perspectives, reflecting on the impact of Brooks' writings and the exceptional life she led.

Gipson brings in different voices to tell Brooks' story, such as award-winning poet Angela Jackson and Brooks' longtime friend George E. Kent, to further inform readers about her literary contributions and activist lifestyle. Gipson touches upon topics such as Brooks' time in the NAACP Youth Council, her charitable efforts to the Black community, and her revolutionary poetry.

She writes:

As a Black woman poet-activist, Brooks also exemplified what it meant to balance womanhood, motherhood, and art. Jackson, as a poet herself, crowns Brooks into “queenhood” in a way that also channels a Black feminist approach to her life and work. Through Brooks’s life and work, Jackson shares the many layered emotions that a Black woman might embody in a racist society. In the early chapters, we learn of Brooks’s desire to experience motherhood, much like how her mother, Keziah Brooks, did for her and brother Raymond. Jackson also reveals the many voices of womanhood and motherhood and how essential these experiences were to Brooks– even if it meant traumatic moments.

Read the rest of the biography here.

Ms. Grace Gipson is a doctoral candidate in the African American Studies program with a designated emphasis in New Media at the University of California Berkeley. Grace’s area of research interests center on various representations of race and gender within digital humanities and black popular culture specifically comic books & graphic novels, Afrofuturism and comic books, and race and new media. Additionally, throughout her academic career, Grace has published various articles and book chapters, and has been featured in Huffington Post and NPR.org. In her spare time, Grace is one fourth of the #BlackComicsChat twitter podcast crew, a regular contributor for the website Black Girl Nerds, as well as the Social Media Manager for The Berkeley Graduate.