Through July 31: 'Margaret Walker' exhibition
University Library announces 'Margaret Walker: A Centenary Exhibition'
(Editor's note: The University of Delaware Library has extended “Margaret Walker: A Centenary Exhibition” through Friday, July 31.)
3:24 p.m., April 30, 2015--The University of Delaware Library will mark July 7, which is the 100th anniversary of the birth of poet, novelist, teacher and critic Margaret Walker. To honor the event, the library has mounted an exhibition titled “Margaret Walker: A Centenary Exhibition,” which will be on display through Friday, July 31, in the Information Room on the first floor of the Morris Library.
Shortly after Walker’s death in 1998, poet and playwright Amiri Baraka wrote, “She was one of the greatest writers of the language. She was the grandest expression of the American poetic voice and the ultimate paradigm of the Afro-American classic literary tradition.”
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Walker’s writing drew in part on traditions of African American oratory, most notably the impassioned rhetoric of the church. Her own father was a Methodist minister and university professor, who, with her mother supported her early desire to write.
With the publication of her poem For My People in 1937, Walker achieved national renown. The collection bearing the same title won the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1942, making Walker the first African American to receive that honor.
For My People established her as a poet of social protest and cultural uplift, a strain of African American poetic expression that nourished luminaries such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Sterling Brown, Sonia Sanchez, Maya Angelou and others.
In 1966, Walker published the novel Jubilee, which had been her doctoral thesis at the University of Iowa. Jubilee is a meticulously researched account of the experiences of a slave family before, during and right after the Civil War. In writing the book, Walker was inspired by stories she had heard from her great grandmother.
Jubilee sold millions of copies and probably served as part of the inspiration for Alex Haley’s historical novel Roots, which appeared in the 1970s.
“Margaret Walker: A Centenary Exhibition” will feature first editions of both For My People (a recent acquisition) and Jubilee. The exhibition will also include later texts such as Prophets for a New Day (1970), a recently acquired chapbook containing 22 poems.
Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, but spent most of her early life in New Orleans. She received a bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University in 1935.
After her graduation she went to work as a writer for the Work Projects Administration (WPA) in Chicago, where she met Richard Wright and other important figures associated with the South Side Writer’s Group.
The curator of the exhibition is Curtis Small, assistant librarian and coordinator of public services in the Special Collections Department.
An online version of the exhibition is available at this website.
Photograph licensed under fair use via Wikipedia