NEWS 2025 — D. H. Melhem

2025: Celebrating the Work of D. H. Melhem

We were pleased to see D. H.’s work on Gwendolyn Brooks featured in the 2024 New York Times article below:

Sometimes, Obsession Finds Its Outlet in a Book.

(Excerpted From the New York Times, May 25, 2024)

A Gwendolyn Brooks biography; a Bill Cunningham photo collection.

Dear Readers,

My first experience with writing a fan letter didn’t go well. It was to the children’s writer and illustrator Tasha Tudor, known as much for her total commitment to living an 1830s lifestyle as for her watercolors of corgis and children. I tried to fashion a quill pen from a feather I’d found in the park (I had to switch to ballpoint) and donned the pair of pantaloons I favored for moments of maximum picturesqueness. “Dear Tasha Tudor” (I wrote), “I think we have a lot in common.” I detailed my near-worship of “A Time to Keep,” my attempts to replicate the Pumpkin House of “The Dolls’ Christmas,” the wonky maypole I had rigged up in the yard.

A classmate, over for a playdate, found the letter and mocked it, but I was undeterred. I applied sealing wax and dropped it in a mailbox. Maybe it was the fact that I sent it to “Tasha Tudor, Marlboro, VT,” but I never heard back.

I should have learned my lesson, but my misadventures did result in the following recommendations.

—Sadie

“Gwendolyn Brooks: Poetry and the Heroic Voice,” by D.H. Melhem

Nonfiction, 1987

When I got to college, I learned that Gwendolyn Brooks lived not far from campus. I didn’t want to bother her, but I was moved to write my second fan letter. (You know how I feel about “Maud Martha.”) She died shortly after I sent my note — I doubt she’d have gotten it — but I’m not sorry I did. And I went down a deep Brooks rabbit hole; the university library had the majority of Brooks’s own writings, and also those dedicated to her work. I read Melhem’s biography of Brooks and then became interested in the biographer, who, I learned, had also been a dear personal friend and respected peer — Brooks recommended Melhem’s “Notes on 94th Street” for a Pulitzer Prize.

That book — an unforgettable love-hate letter to New York City that’s considered the first English-language poetry collection published by an Arab American woman — is worth reading if you can get your hands on it. (With its follow-up, it’s collected in “New York Poems.”) But definitely read the more easily found Brooks biography. Don’t be deterred by the academic trappings: While this is, no question, a serious critical study, it’s also a vibrant portrait of the artist by a gifted poet. Brooks emerges as a complex figure who, almost until her death, was a tireless advocate for other Black writers, particularly young ones. Melhem locates Brooks’s large body of work in the context of her Chicago youth and her civil rights work; she studies her influences and her place in the canon. The book was published in 1987, but it remains relevant.

Read if you like: Gwendolyn Brooks; D.H. Melhem; Chicago
Available from: University Press of Kentucky (eBook)

NOTE: NYT article continues with “Facades,” by Bill Cunningham, a book of photography.

Coming Up: D. H. Melhem: Unsung Master!

We have been contacted by parties interested in publishing some poems and a bio of D. H. Melhem in an anthology series, “Unsung Masters.” We will update as publication approaches. https://unsungmasters.org/

Fond Memory: D. H. Melhem and Cynthia Ozick

We recently came across this lovely 1994 photo of D. H. with her lifelong friend, renowned writer Cynthia Ozick. Photographer unknown.

Thanks for Dana Vogel for submitting.