Cullen is awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for study in France
Poet involved
What happened
On 19 March 1928 the New York Times listed Countee Cullen among the Guggenheim Fund’s new fellows. The award, about $2,500, was to support a year of writing and study in France. He was only the second African American to receive the fellowship. The grant was meant to free him to finish narrative poems and other work away from Harlem’s social calendar.
Literary impact
The fellowship sent Cullen into the Paris years that produced The Black Christ and Other Poems and a run of Crisis articles. Distance from New York also exposed the gap between his public role as race poet and the private life that soon broke his first marriage.
Source: Wikipedia
