From Poet to Publisher: Reading Gwendolyn Brooks by Design

This chapter compares the design of Gwendolyn Brooks’s poetry collections across three different publishers: Harper & Brothers, Third World Press and David, her own press. It will argue that Brooks engaged in a decades-long project of figuring out how she wanted to have her poetry read and who she imagined her primary audience to be. Brooks’s move from the white literary establishment to a black-owned small press, and then from there to her own publishing venture, allows a comparison of the ‘same’ poems in different design contexts and with different readerships in mind.