Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on the seventh of June 1917 at Topeka, Kansas, the daughter of David Anderson Brooks — a janitor who had completed one year of medical school at Fisk University before family obligations required him to abandon it — and Keziah Wims Brooks, a teacher and concert pianist. The family moved to Chicago when she was six weeks old and she was raised at 4332 South Champlain Avenue in the Bronzeville district of the South Side — the neighbourhood she would across her life make the principal subject of her work. She was educated at the segregated public schools of the South Side and at Wilson Junior College, completing the two-year diploma in 1936.

She published her first poem in the children's section of American Childhood at thirteen, became a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender's "Lights and Shadows" column at sixteen, and at twenty-three married the writer Henry Lowington Blakely II — their fifty-six-year marriage produced one of the central poetic partnerships of mid-twentieth-century Chicago. She studied poetry across the early 1940s at the Inez Cunningham Stark workshop at the South Side Community Art Center.

Her first collection — A Street in Bronzeville of 1945 — established at twenty-eight her place as the principal poet of urban African American life. The second collection — Annie Allen of 1949 — received in 1950 the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. It was the first Pulitzer awarded to an African American writer in any category.

She published across the following fifty years a body of work that combined the lyric formalism of her early training with progressive engagement with the political and literary movements of her century. In the Mecca of 1968 turned the long-form epic Pulitzer-winning narrative voice to the documentary witness of the South Side; she succeeded Carl Sandburg as Poet Laureate of Illinois the same year and held the title until her death thirty-two years later. She became the first African American Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985 — the position now styled Poet Laureate of the United States.

She died at her Chicago home on the third of December 2000, at eighty-three.

She is honored here as the Poet Laureate of Black Chicago.