Moving In and Stepping Out: Gwendolyn Brooks’s Children at Midcentury

Drawing on archival evidence, “Moving In and Stepping Out” reinterprets Gwendolyn Brooks’s novel Maud Martha, her long poem, “The Life of Lincoln West,” and her volume of poetry for children, Bronzeville Boys and Girls through an intertextual lens. Together, this cluster of texts supports a reassessment of Brooks’s midcentury project, one which suggests a pre-1967 shift toward black aesthetics and a revised vision of that aesthetic to include a particular emphasis on the poetics and geographies of childhood as unsuspected vehicles for stepping outside of established social narratives of race, gender, and age subordination.