Journey back to the mid-90s as preeminent scholar, writer, and poet, Maria K. Mootry, reflects on the movements that shaped a generation through the lens of literature and a deep love of language.

In her own words:"Coming back to Illinois, this time central, not southern, from Iowa made me feel things I did not expect. So much History, yet a sense of being suspended, perhaps because we face a new millennium.

. .

Going to Lincoln, Illinois, and remembering pictures of Langston Hughes with his mother, who taught him to love literature, standing beside their house in Lincoln, pictures of Langston and high school friends grinning into a camera held by somebody who cared, stirred me. Langston, rooted here in the Midwest, reached out so much, to Harlem, Paris, Africa, Russia, Spain, —an ever-widening circle.

I like to think I talk to him across that space and time. "Mootry's place in academia is firmly established as the co-author of the definitive text about Gwendolyn Brooks, A Life Distilled.

She also wrote the introduction to a popular edition of Edna Ferber's So Big, making her the first African-American scholar invited to do so for an author of the Midwestern American canon. .