Cheryl D.Edwards

BIENNIAL MARYLAND REGIONAL JURIED ART EXHIBITION. Opening Reception and Awards Presentation
When
Sunday, June 7, 2026
3–5 p.m.
Where
UMGC Arts Program Gallery, Lower Level. Address
College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center
3501 University Blvd. East
Adelphi, MD 20783. ‘The Presence’,2025, ink stain on raw canvas mixed media, 72” x 37” unframed

Gwendolyn Brooks Wrote the Interior Life of Black America
Long before diversity became publishing shorthand, Brooks built an uncompromising literary universe rooted in Black dignity, struggle, intimacy, and survival.

There are certain writers who describe America, and then there are writers who expose the machinery underneath it. Gwendolyn Brooks belonged to the second category.

She did not merely write poems. She mapped migration. She recorded hunger. She documented cramped apartments, deferred dreams, exhausted mothers, corner-store philosophers, church women, soldiers, gamblers, lovers, children, and Black people who carried entire civilizations inside bodies America frequently ignored. If Walt Whitman mythologized democratic possibility and Robert Frost distilled pastoral loneliness, Brooks transformed Black urban life into an American epic.

For decades, American literary institutions treated Black existence as sociological material rather than intellectual territory. Brooks changed that permanently.

Read the full story at https://www.kolumnmagazine.com/2026/05/29/gwendolyn-brooks-wrote-the-interior-life-of-black-america/

“Between 1821 and the 1830s, hundreds of Black Seminoles and enslaved individuals successfully utilized this southern route [Saltwater Railroad] to achieve freedom. Today, descendants of the original Black Seminole exiles still live in the Bahamas, and the maritime legacy of their escape remains an essential piece of African diaspora history.” Blackpast.org

Before the Americas exhibit is now closed spanning over a year and one half year of exhibition and programs. It has received national and international attention. This pitting the artists in the exhibit within the context of global conversation. I am humbled and very grateful.