Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on the seventh of June 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, and while she was still an infant her family settled on the South Side of Chicago, the city that would shape and hold her for the rest of her life. Her father, David Anderson Brooks, the son of a man who had fled slavery, worked as a janitor for a music company; he had once hoped to become a doctor but set that ambition aside to marry and provide for his family. Her mother, Keziah, a schoolteacher and pianist, nurtured her daughter's gifts early, and Brooks was publishing poems in her teens.

From the streets and kitchenettes of the Bronzeville neighborhood, Brooks drew a poetry of extraordinary precision and tenderness, giving voice to the ordinary dignity of Black urban life. Her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, appeared in 1945 to wide acclaim. In 1950 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Annie Allen, becoming the first African American ever to receive a Pulitzer Prize in any category, a landmark in American letters.

The Black Arts movement of the late 1960s reawakened her sense of purpose; after a 1967 writers' conference at Fisk University, she turned toward small Black-owned presses and a more direct address to her community. In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate of Illinois, an office she held with devotion until her death, and in 1985 she became the first Black woman to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She taught, mentored, and quietly funded prizes for young writers out of her own means.

Gwendolyn Brooks died in Chicago on the third of December 2000, at the age of eighty-three. She remained, in her own words, an organic Chicagoan to the last. We honor her as a keeper of ordinary lives, who made of a single neighborhood a whole nation's poetry.