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
(1942),
Prophets for a New Day
(1970), and
October Journey
(1975).