"Steady and Unaccusing": An Interview with Sterling A. Brown
Issue Date
1998-09-01Author
Tidwell, John E.
Wright, John S.
Publisher
Johns Hopkins University Press
Type
Article
Article Version
Scholarly/refereed, publisher version
Published Version
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v021/21.4tidwell02.htmlMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Since the early 1980s a series of symposia, public and academic awards, and other recognitions have testified to continuing popular and scholarly interest in Sterling A. Brown, poet, literary critic, teacher, anthologist, and raconteur. The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (Harper & Row), for example, received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for 1980 from Saturday Review. The Modern Language Association, at its December 1981 meeting, paid tribute to Brown's many years of distinguished service as a man of letters. A Black World special issue (September 1970) and Michael Harper and Robert Stepto's Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (1979) became the first two of many anthologies, critical studies, and journal special issues dedicated to him, for his enduring poetic innovations and his pioneering cultural criticism. At Howard University, on February 14, 1997, a symposium assessed the extent to which Brown's thinking reflected and influenced African-American and American views on culture and literature. His sensitive creative work and astute analyses are captured in four published collections of poetry, six critical studies and anthologies, and over forty essays and speeches, together with the regular book review column he wrote in the early issues of Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life. The following interview--conducted August 2, 1980, but unpublished until now--was one he hoped personally to extend and revise. Nevertheless it offers in retrospect, we think, more testimony that Sterling A. Brown is a presence who remains, in the words from one of his favorite poems, "steady and unaccusing."
Description
This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from On author's personal website, departmental website or institutional repository. On a non-profit server. Publisher copyright and source must be acknowledged. In open access repositories, such as PubMed Central if required by law. Publisher's version/PDF may be used. Reviewed on 03/02/14.
ISSN
0161-2492Collections
- English Scholarly Works [308]
Citation
Tidwell, John E.; Wright, John S. (1998). "'Steady and Unaccusing': An Interview with Sterling A. Brown." Callaloo, 21(4):811-821. http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/callaloo/v021/21.4tidwell02.html
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