BY WAY OF the complicated life of poet Countée Cullen and the influence of the Harlem Renaissance, an autobiographical meditation emerges from Kevin Brown’s combination of family recollections and literary essays: Countée Cullen’s Harlem Renaissance: A Personal History. This engaging narrative, nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, is structured in 24 essays that are initially focused on Cullen and other mid-20th-century Black writers, then weave in responses to Cullen’s work by Black artists and writers of the last forty years.