Children Coming Home

Chicago: The David Company, 1991 First edition, publisher’s original stiff wrappers, a black and white mottled design of a composition notebook with poems written in first-person voice of twenty imagined young characters. Presentation copy signed and inscribed "For Kenan Heise. / Sincerely / Gwendolyn Brooks / July 21, 1996." A few faint creases to front cover, else book in fine condition, issued without a dust jacket. Kenan Heise’s links to Chicago history are strong, nurturing relationships with Chicago luminaries such as Gwendolyn Brooks and Studs Terkel. Kenan Heise is a member of the Chicago Journalism Hall of Fame, a prolific author and historian, a poet and a playwright, and a prodigious book collector and broker (Proprietor of Chicago Historical Bookworks). He worked for the Chicago Tribune newspapers for 36 years, including Chicago's American, Chicago Today and the Tribune. He is a Michigan native, and has written or collaborated on more than 25 books and memoirs about his beloved adopted city, including, "They Speak for Themselves: Interviews With the Destitute of Chicago," a 1965 collection that anticipated Studs Terkel's later oral histories. Gwendolyn Brooks is the first Black author to receive the Pulitzer Prize. She also was poetry consultant to the Library of Congress—the first Black woman to hold that position—and Poet Laureate of the State of Illinois.