Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, but her family moved to Chicago, Illinois when she was just six weeks old. The Brookses were but one of thousands of Black families that traveled north and east in the early decades of the 20th century as part of the Great Migration. Her father was a janitor, and her mother was a teacher and an accomplished pianist. Brooks’s public-school education included a South Side neighborhood elementary school and three different high schools: the integrated (but predominantly White) Hyde Park High School, the all-Black Wendell Phillips High School, and the integrated Englewood High School. Brooks faced significant prejudice and racism from her White peers at the integrated schools. She did not pursue a college education beyond a two-year program at a public junior college in Chicago. But Brooks had begun writing as a girl—her first poem was published when she was just 13. Subsequently, she became a regular contributor to the poetry column in the Chicago Defender, a Black-owned newspaper. In 1939, at the age of 22, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., whom she met in the Chicago NCAAP’s Youth Council. They had two children. Brooks wrote steadily throughout her life and quickly came to national acclaim for her poetry in adulthood. After placing two poems in the prestigious Poetry magazine, she published her first collection of poems, A Street in Bronzeville, in 1945. She won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 for her collection Annie Allen. She was the first Black recipient of that award. Brooks was active in the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and continued to write and teach throughout her life. She was the poet laureate of Illinois from 1968-2000, the poet laureate of the United States from 1985-1986, and the first Black woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976. Her body of work includes Maud Martha, a novel published in 1953, and 17 long poems or collections of poems. She died in 2000 at the age of 83 and is buried on Chicago’s South Side.