Ida Gerding Athens (February 23, 1882 – November 4, 1977) was an American author. She wrote a collection of poetry titled ''Brethren''. Born Ida Bird Gerding in

Cleves, Ohio Cleves is a village in Miami Township, Hamilton County, Ohio, United States, located along the Ohio River. The population was 3,234 at the 2010 census. Founded in 1818, it is named for John Cleves Symmes who lived here, laid out the original tow ...

, she came from a poor German-American family. She was included in the '' Who's Who of African American Writers'' because of her candid comments upon racial tension in the United States, perhaps inspired by her own low

socio-economic Socioeconomics (also known as social economics) is the social science that studies how economic activity affects and is shaped by social processes. In general it analyzes how modern societies progress, stagnate, or regress because of their local ...

background. Her poetry from the 1930s was discussed by James Edward Smethurst in ''The New Red Negro: The Literary Left and African-American Poetry, 1930–1946'' together with that of Lucy Mae Turner,

Frank Marshall Davis Frank Marshall Davis (December 31, 1905 – July 26, 1987) was an American journalist, poet, political and labor movement activist, and businessman. Davis began his career writing for African American newspapers in Chicago. He moved to Atlant ...

, Waring Cuney, Richard Wright and Countée Cullen. Smethurst notes that Gerding Athens appeared to be separated from the mainstream of left-wing African-American literature, yet "manifested important thematic and formal concerns" in her poetry that he considers characteristic of 1930s–40s African-American poetry. She was supposedly influential in choosing the geranium as Ohio's state flower. She married William Wilson Athens II on December 23, 1917, as his second wife. She died in

Cincinnati, Ohio Cincinnati ( ) is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Hamilton County. Settled in 1788, the city is located at the northern side of the confluence of the Licking and Ohio rivers, the latter of which marks the state line wi ...

Publications

Source:Athens, Ida Gerding

WorldCat WorldCat is a union catalog that itemizes the collections of tens of thousands of institutions (mostly libraries), in many countries, that are current or past members of the OCLC global cooperative. It is operated by OCLC, Inc. Many of the O ...

(accessed 8 June 2022) * ''Brethren'', 1940 * ''John three, sixteen'', 1959

References

1882 births 1977 deaths American women poets American people of German descent 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers People from Cleves, Ohio {{US-poet-1880s-stub