2022-2023 Core Book: Selected Poems

Art Urges Voyages

We invite you to read with our students, staff, and faculty Gwendolyn Brooks' book Selected Poems as a part of Wheaton College’s Core Book program.

The Core Book program fosters a shared experience across the campus community as we read, reflect upon, and discuss together a significant work that highlights themes of Wheaton’s Christ at the Core general education curriculum.

Join us in reading Gwendolyn Brooks’ Selected Poems. As a lifelong resident of the Bronzeville neighborhood in south Chicago, Brooks bore witness to the joys and sorrows of ordinary lives with a poet’s eye and a prophet’s vision. Brooks’ poetry is accessible, even to the novice poetry reader, and she writes with an incisive clarity that opens the reader’s eyes to see the world as it is and as it could be. She once described the experiences we have day-to-day as “poetry in the rough.” As we read Brooks’ poetry together, we will encounter quotidian scenes of mid-twentieth century southside Chicago - from the public spaces of front yards, pool halls, beauty shops, bars, and vacant lots to the private spaces of back yards, tiny kitchenette apartments, and the interior life and thoughts of city residents.

Selected Poems

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, July 3, 2006
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Why Selected Poems?

Brooks’ poetry captures the daily realities of Black Americans during the difficult Civil Rights era with realism and hope. Her poetry returns time and again to the enduring themes of family, identity, living in community, poverty, and the human experience. Brooks demonstrated a mastery of classical and modern forms of poetry, weaving allusions to classic books and scripture throughout her work. We invite you to read with us as we ask how reading and entering into the worlds that Brooks captured might help us expand our understanding of the human experience and speak into our interaction with our communities and the world around us.