Gwendolyn Brooks
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Gwendolyn Brooks – Boy Breaking Glass

Gwendolyn Brooks' Boy Breaking Glass looks at the creative imperative and the drive towards expression in a boy with curtailed options. Dedicated to the writer Marc Crawford who asked Brooks to write a poem about inequality, the images she uses are detractive and dissonant - the hole in the glass filled with the contrasting black and white objects.

James Baldwin
Book Bits

If Love Will Not Swing Wide the Gates, No Other Power Will

James Baldwin describes his own coming of age and awakening to spiritual and political consciousness as beginning with the revelation of sin: 'I became, during my fourteenth year, for the first time in my life, afraid—afraid of the evil within me and afraid of the evil without.'

Ta-Nehisi Coates
Book Bits

The Inscrutable Energy that Preserves the Breach

In this excerpt from an article published prior to the release of Between the World and Me, Coates talks about his childhood in West Baltimore. He describes the gap he felt between his own world and the world he saw through the TV set, as well as the perplexity and disingenuity of being fed a stream of non-violent role models at school.