Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was a pioneering poet who captured the joys and pains of the African-American experience in her work. Ms. Brooks won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950, the first Black person to do so.
Born June 7, 1917 in Topeka, Kan., Brooks and her family relocated to Chicago early on. Her mother was a classically trained pianist who taught school because she couldn’t afford medical school. Her father, a janitor, also had medical school dreams but the costs were too great. Brooks’ parents instilled in her a love of reading and writing, nurturing her early poetry and crafting a space for her to create.
At 13, she had her first poem published in the American Childhood magazine. By age 16, she had written 75 poems and began to meet many of her idols. She met Harlem Renaissance writers Langston Hughes and James Wheldon Johnson as a high school student and both encouraged her to hone her craft.
In 1935, Brooks graduated high school and enrolled in Wilson Junior College to major in English. In 1937, she worked for the local NAACP youth council as its publicity director. Brooks began taking poetry workshops in Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center. In 1943, she won a poetry award from the Midwestern Writers’ Conference.
This gave her the courage to send an extensive bundle of her works to the Harper and Row publishing house. The editors there signed her to a book deal, releasing her first poetry collection, A Street In Bronzeville. The book featured tales of ordinary African-Americans trying to work, live and survive despite oppression, war and poverty. The book’s success led to her first Guggenheim fellowship and acknowledgment as one of the “Ten Women Of The Year” in Mademoiselle magazine.
Her 1949 book, “Annie Allen,” went on to win the 1950 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. In the 1960s, Brooks taught creative writing at Columbia College in Chicago, Chicago State University, Northeastern Illinois University, Columbia University and the University of Wisconsin. Brooks continued to write during this time, and her 1968 poem “In The Mecca” was nominated for National Book Award.
Brooks married Henry Blakely in 1939, and the pair remained married until she succumbed to cancer in 2000 at the age of 83. The couple had two children, Henry and Nora.
Brooks has won countless awards and honors, including becoming the Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and for the Library of Congress in 1985. In 1995, she was awarded the National Medal Of Arts, and named the first Woman Of The Year by the Harvard’s Black Men’s Forum.
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