Sterling A. Brown (1982)

Poet, scholar, critic, Harlem Renaissance participant, Professor Emeritus, and distinguished editor Sterling A. Brown guided such writers as Toni Morrison, Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael), Ossie Davis, and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) to pursue their own artistic paths. He affirmed the soul-speech of black folk in their lives and lore, and gave dignity and pathos to rejected themes of the black American experience. By linking his own poetry to the formal traditions in our literature, Brown created new forms. He was the storyteller, song maker, and voice of Black heroes and heroines. Brown said, “The sincere, sensitive artist, willing to go beneath the clichés of popular belief to get at an underlying reality, will be wary of confining a race’s entire characters to a half-dozen narrow grooves.”