We Are Each Other: The Enduring Legacy of Gwendolyn Brooks, Sponsored by Furious Flower Poetry Center
Saturday, March 20, 1:45 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET
Furious Flower celebrates the legacy of iconic Chicago poet Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. This panel reflects on Brooks’s massive impact on the field—from her youth in the 1930s Black Chicago Renaissance through her mentorship of Black Arts Movement poets and her continuing afterlives as a writer, teacher, and inspiration. The panelists will reflect on Brooks’s life, poetry, and legacy, and present poems marked by her towering influence.
Panelist bios:
Patricia Smith is the author of ten books of poetry, including The Intentions of Thunder: New and Selected Poems (Scribner), winner of the 2025 National Book Award and 2026 NAACP Image Award and finalist for the 2026 Pulitzer Prize. Smith is the recipient of a Furious Flower Lifetime Achievement Award and a Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for Lifetime Achievement, and is an Academy of American Poets Chancellor, an inductee of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, and a four-time National Poetry Slam champion. She is a professor in the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University.
A. Van Jordan is the author of five collections of poetry, including most recently When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again (W. W. Norton & Co), winner of the 2024 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a finalist for the 2024 Rilke Prize. Jordan has been awarded a Whiting Writers Award, an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship (2007), and a Pushcart Prize. He is the Humanities & Sciences Chair in English Literature at Stanford University and part of the inaugural faculty in the Department of African & African American Studies.
Poet and scholar Evie Shockley thinks, creates, and writes with her eye on a Black feminist horizon. Her books of poetry include suddenly we (NAACP Image Award; National Book Award finalist), semiautomatic (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award; Pulitzer Prize finalist), and the new black (Hurston/Wright Legacy Award); her poetry has also received the Academy Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement, the Shelley Memorial Award, the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and the Stephen Henderson Award. Her joys include participating in poetry communities such as Furious Flower and collaborating with artists working in various media. Shockley is the Zora Neale Hurston Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University.
Nate Marshall is an author and editor born and raised on the South Side of Chicago. Marshall was the recipient of the 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library Foundation. He is an associate professor in the creative writing program at the University of Wisconsin. His next book, Something Blue, is out March 2027 from One World/Random House.