Beginning with her debut collection, A Street in Bronzeville, and ending with a selection from In Montgomery and Other Poems, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks traces the poetic legacy of Brooks, whose literary honors include the Pulitzer Prize and an Academy of American Poets Fellowship, among others. Academy of American Poets Chancellor Elizabeth Alexander serves as the editor of the collection, in which she also provides an introduction to Brooks’s work: “Her formal range,” Alexander writes, “is most impressive, as she experiments with sonnets, ballads, spirituals, blues, full and off-rhymes. She is nothing short of a technical virtuoso.”