Carolyn Rodgers

Carolyn Marie Rodgers was born in Chicago on the fourteenth of December 1940 — sources vary on the year — and raised in Bronzeville, on the South Side, daughter of Clarence and Bazella Rodgers. She came up under the mentorship of Gwendolyn Brooks and, from 1967, inside the OBAC Writers' Workshop, one of the crucibles of the Black Arts Movement.

In December 1967, with Haki Madhubuti and Johari Amini, she co-founded Third World Press — grown since into one of the oldest and largest Black-owned presses in America — and it published her first collections, Paper Soul (1968) and Songs of a Blackbird (1969). She was the first recipient of the Conrad Kent Rivers Memorial Award and took the Society of Midland Authors' poetry honor in 1970.

Her selected poems, how i got ovah (1975), made her a National Book Award finalist in 1976. In the years after, the militant edge of her early voice turned toward faith, mothers and daughters, and the long work of self-repair — without ever losing its Chicago cadence — through volumes she issued from her own Eden Press. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Malcolm X College, and campuses beyond.

She died at Mercy Hospital in Chicago on the second of April 2010, at sixty-nine, honored in her last years by the halls of fame of her craft and her city. Honored be Carolyn Rodgers, who wrote how the bridge was crossed, and was the bridge.