| dc.description.abstract | 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 The following interview--conducted August 2, 1980, but unpublished until now--was one he hoped personally to extend and revise.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." | en_US |
