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Helene Johnson |
Helene Johnson grew up in Boston, and when she was selected for a prize by Opportunity Magazine (the judges were James Weldon Johnson and Robert Frost) she talked her mother into letting her go to the awards dinner in New York. She was eighteen. She and her cousin, the novelist Dorothy West, went together, shared a room at the Harlem Y, and stayed on, making friends with Zora Hurston and writing all the time.
She was the youngest of the Harlem Renaissance poets, appearing regularly in newspapers and magazines, including Vanity Fair, but in her brief career she was recognized as one of the most exciting poets of the new movement. She published only twenty-eight poems, and stopped sending them out in 1935, disappearing into her marriage. But she said later, rocking at her window, that she wrote a poem every day for the rest of her life. She died at eight-nine.
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Immortal Poets: Their Lives and Verse, by Christopher Burns |