This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems [Paperback]

MARGARET WALKER (1915-1998) wrote poetry, essays, the novel Jubilee, and a biography of Richard Wright. She created pioneering programs in the humanities and African American studies at Jackson State University, where she was a faculty member for almost three decades.

Margaret Walker became the first African American to win a national literary award when her collection For My People was chosen for the Yale Series of Younger Poets in 1942. Over the next fifty years she enriched American literature in endless ways through her writings and, in 1993, she received the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement.

This Is My Century is Walker's own defining summation of her career. Selected by the author herself, the one hundred poems include thirty-seven previously uncollected pieces and the entire contents of three hard-to-find volumes: the award-winning For My People (1942), Prophets for a New Day (1970), and October Journey (1975).

Always immediate but classic in voice, [Walker’s] poetry has a timeless quality. . . . If younger poets have ranged farther in voice and content, it is because they stand high on the shoulders of giants such as Margaret Walker.

A pivotal figure . . . Hers is, in the final analysis, a grand presence that this collected volume of lifetime works affirms.

Walker writes with a strength and clarity that befits her large vision of American and African American history.

Addressing the literature and culture of black America, This Is My Century, a classic first published in 1989, marked a significant contribution to American Poetry, bringing together Walker's selection of one hundred of her own poems.