Gwendolyn Brooks was an American poet and teacher. She was the first black author to win a Pulitzer prize, the first black woman to become poetry consultant to the Library of Congress and the Poet Laureate of Illinois from 1968 until her death.
Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas to David Anderson and Kesiah Brooks. When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago as part of the Great Migration. Brooks first attended the prestigious, integrated Hyde Park High School before transferring to the all-black Wendell Phillips Academy High School, then the integrated Englewood High School. While attending some of these high schools, Brooks experienced racial prejudice that would later influence her writing. By the age of 13, Brooks had her first poem “Eventide” published in American Childhood and by 16 she had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At 17 she frequently had poetry published in the “Lights and Shadows” column of the Chicago Defender, a black newspaper.
After high school, Brooks attended Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) and writing poems which ranged from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse. She graduated in 1936, and worked as a secretary to support herself while continuing to write. Two years later, Brooks was appointed as the publicity director of the local NAACP Youth Council, where she would meet her future husband Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr.
In 1941, she began attending poetry workshops at Chicago’s South Side Community Art Center, including one run by Inez Cunning Stark. Brooks continued to write poems influenced by urban black Chicago, and the workshops enabled her to refine her skills. Two years later, Brooks won a poetry award from the Midwestern Writer’s Conference and she began collected work together to form her first book of poetry. A Street in Bronzeville was published in 1945 and became an instant success, leading to many honours including a Guggenheim Fellowship. She followed this with Annie Allen in 1949, for which she became the first black author to win the Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She also won Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize.
In the 1950’s, Brooks published her first and only novel entitled Maud Martha, which details a black woman’s life in short vignettes. Maud, the title character is subjected to discrimination from both whites and blacks, particularly those who have lighter skin than hers. Brooks drew on her own experience in writing the book, and showed what black people go to in being subjected to white standards of beauty.
In the early 1960’s, Brooks began her teaching career when invited by author Frank London Brown to teach a course in American literature at the University of Chicago. Brooks then taught extensively around the country, holding posts at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, City College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Throughout her teaching career, Brooks continued to write and publish and in 1967 her work took a far more political stance following a gathering of black writers at Fisk University. A year later, “In The Mecca” was published, showing “a deepening of Brooks’s concern with social problems” and drew inspiration events of the time, including the death of Malcolm X and the dedication of a mural of black heroes painted on a Chicago building. The book was nominated for a National Book Award in poetry. That same year, she became the Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position which enabled her to encourage and honour poets in her state through the Illinois Poets Laureate Awards and Significant Illinois Poets Awards programs.
In 1972, Brooks published the first of two volumes of autobiography entitled Report from Part One, the second part of her autobiography was written while she served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She was the first black woman appointed to the post. In 2000, she died at her home on Chicago’s South Side. She is buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.
Brooks was the recipient of many honours, including the Shelley Memorial Award of the Poetry Society of America (1976) and the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America (1989); the National Book Foundations’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (1994); the National Medal of Arts (1995); the Chicago History Museum’s “Making History Award” for Distinction in Literature (1995) and the Order of Lincoln award from The Lincoln Academy of Illinois, the highest honour granted by the State of Illinois. She was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1988 and there are many education facilities now named after her including the Gwendolyn Books Cultural Centre at Western Illinois University, Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing at Chicago State University and Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library at Springfield, Illinois amongst others. She also received more than 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide.