Gwendolyn Bennett Crosscup of Kutztown, Pa., a figure in the Harlem Renaissance Movement in the 1920s, died in the Reading, Pa. Hospital on May 30.

She would have been 79 in August.

Her poetry has been published in anthologies and has been translated into Spanish and other languages.

In 1979, a doctoral dissertation on her life and career as a poet, painter, art teacher, and Harlem educator, was accepted at a university in Atlanta.

In New York City in the 1940s and 1950s she was the director of the George Washington Carver School, an adult education center, and was also head of the Harlem Art Center.