Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks

• Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an African-American poet.

• She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950 and was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968 and Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1985.

• Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. 

• She had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper. 

• Her poems, many published while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems using blues rhythms in free verse.

• Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), published by Harper and Row, earned instant critical acclaim.

• She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was included as one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine. 

• With her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1950), she became the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; she also was awarded Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize.  

• Some of her major work include Negro Hero (1945), The Mother (1945) and A Street in Bronzeville (1945)