In 2013, Cornelius Eady was commissioned by the Poetry Society of America to set three poems by Sterling A. Brown to music. Since then, Eady has composed music for an additional nine Brown poems. The Sterling Brown Project is a celebration of Brown’s canon, an exploration of the historical context of his work, and a testament to the power of art as Black resistance and Black joy. Eady is joined by a spectacular group of musicians, and additional works are read by esteemed poet Rowan Ricardo Phillips.
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Called “the Poet Laureate of the Jim Crow South,” Sterling Brown’s blues and folk poems drop the reader into the untold, hidden stories of African-American life. Police and vigilante violence, cotton fields and tenements are all rendered in gripping narratives and poignant verse.
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Twice-nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, The Southern Review described Cornelius Eady as “the heir of Langston Hughes,” and Leslie Ullman says his work “[offers] brief glimpses of urban life, meditations to jazz and blues music, and a quiet, crystalline sort of anger.”
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Permission to reprint and adapt the poems was granted by Mrs. Elizabeth Dennis and the Estate of Sterling A. Brown.