Haki R. Madhubuti
When 21 Is More Than A Number

Haki Madhubuti is the founder and Chairman of Third World Press, publisher of Gwendolyn Brooks and many other African American poets and writers. Madhubuti is an influential poet in the Black Arts Movement and is the author of 19 books, including Earthquakes and Sun Rise Missions: Poetry and Essays of Black Renewal 1973-1983.

Design: Mary-Jo Mostowy and KC Clarke

This broadside uses a letterpress technique know as a blind strike or blank strike, where a plate is impressed into the paper without ink. The words twenty one appear behind the text of the poem and a line from the poem runs up the side.

The poem and the blind strike 'twenty-one' in the shape of a cross behind the text memorialize the twenty-one victims of the E2 Night Club tragedy on Chicago's Southside.