
A Crack in the Harlem Closet
BY WAY OF the complicated life of poet Countée Cullen and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance, an autobiographical meditation emerges from Kevin Brown’s combination of family recollections and literary essays: Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History. This engaging narrative, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is structured in 24 essays that are initially focused on Cullen and other mid-20th-century Black writers, then weave in responses to Cullen’s work by Black artists and writers of the last forty years.
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