Sterling Allen Brown; English Professor, D.C.’s Poet Laureate

Sterling Allen Brown, 87, a former English professor at Howard University who wrote his first book of poems, “Southern Road,” in 1932 and at his death had become the District of Columbia’s poet laureate. Son of a Howard University religion teacher, Brown studied poets and black leaders and sought, through his own poetry, to portray the diversity of American life for blacks. He taught at several colleges before going to Howard, where he taught from 1929 until his retirement in 1969. In 1984 he was named the district’s poet laureate. He won the Opportunity Prize Literary Contest in the 1920s and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in the early 1980s. In Washington on Friday.