EXQUISITE by Suzanne Slade, illustrated by Cozbi A. Cabrera - Wall Street Journal "Children’s Books: Portraits of the Artist"
Wall Street Journal | July 10, 2020
“When Gwendolyn Brooks was a girl, she heard her father reciting poetry. When she was 11, her own verses appeared in a Chicago newspaper. Twenty-two years after that, Brooks (1917-2000) became the first black writer to win the Pulitzer Prize. Suzanne Slade tells how it all unfurled in a lyrical illustrated biography for children ages 5-9.
‘Exquisite’ (Abrams, 48 pages, $17.99) is a testament to the generative powers of a bookish childhood and cultured, supportive parents. There wasn’t much money in the Brooks home, yet Gwendolyn’s family ‘owned great treasure—a bookcase filled with precious poems.’
In Cozbi A. Cabrera’s expressive naif paintings, we see the joy that these volumes gave. We see young Gwendolyn at the piano, her mother coming in to praise the girl’s literary efforts. Through an awkward adolescence, through marriage and motherhood and a series of unedifying jobs, Brooks kept writing. Using different poetic forms, she sought to capture, as Ms. Slade puts it, the ‘nonstop busyness, the hard-luck grittiness, of life in her South Side Chicago neighborhood—Bronzeville—where businesses boomed on 47th Street, where hardworking families didn’t have enough to eat, where people jumped and jived to a new, jazzy beat’” It was her second collection, ‘Annie Allen’ (1949), that would secure her place in the Pulitzer pantheon.”
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