Voices of Brooklyn 
(an anthology edited by Sol Yurick)

Chicago: American Library Association, 1973.
Introduction by Sol Yurick.

In this anthology of creative expression…all previously unpublished, we hear policemen, college students, revolutionaries, housewives, addicts, teachers, and war veterans. We hear blacks, Puerto Ricans, Italians, and Jews; the young and the old; the shackled and the liberated. In poems and short stories they raise questions of social harmony and personal fulfillment.

Sol Yurick…selected and edited these entries for a project organized by the Brooklyn Public Library and financed by the National Endowments for the Humanities. As he claims in his introduction to the anthology, unpublished writers like these deserve more opportunities for publication. Space for the  imagination is closing down, yet the need to write persists. The project made clear that an astounding number of people do write; and they should write, for many of them offer us something unique. …The everyday awareness of individuals living in an urban community is magnified into existential dimensions that completely transcend any concern with locality.

Available HERE and at Barnes & Noble HERE

The anthology…will contain, according to Mr. Yurick: “Poems. Stories. Parts of Novels. Episodes in your life.
Fragments of movie scripts. Short plays and excerpts from long plays. Surreal and real. Natural and apocalyptic. Fantasies. Trips…The songs of telephone repairmen and the mocking chants of college students. Heroisim. Cowardice. Significant deaths and insignificant lives wanting to cry from the grave of everyday life. Unleashed stifled voices.”
—Brooklyn Author Edits Anthology by New Talent, by Fred Ferretti. New York Times. April 4, 1971.