Our Miss Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black person to win a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. She won the Pulitzer for her book of poetry, Annie Allen, which consists of three parts about a Black girl growing into womanhood. Other popular works by Ms Brooks include the poem We Real Cool, and Malcom X.

Ms. Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas to Keziah Wims Brooks and David Anderson Brooks. Brooks' mother was a former school teacher who left teaching for marriage and motherhood, and her father, the son of a runaway slave who fought in the Civil War, had given up his ambition to attend medical school to work as a janitor because he could not afford to attend medical school. Her family moved to Chicago when Brooks was only six weeks old.

Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents. Her father provided a desk and bookshelves, and her mother took her, when she was in high school, to meet Harlem Renaissance poets Langston Hughes and James Weldon Johnson.

Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. When Brooks was sixteen years old, she had compiled a portfolio of around seventy-five published poems. At age 17, Brooks began submitting her works to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the Chicago Defender. Although her poems range in style from traditional ballads and sonnets to using blues rhythms in free verse, her characters are often drawn from the poor inner city. During this same period, she also attended Wilson Junior College, from where she graduated in 1936. After publishing more than seventy-five poems and failing to obtain a position with the Chicago Defender, Brooks began to work a series of typing jobs.

In 1938, Gwendolyn married Henry Blakely and gave birth to two children, Henry, Jr. and Nora. By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. In 1943 she received an award for poetry from the Midwestern Writers' Conference.

Her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, published in 1945 brought her instant critical acclaim. She received her first Guggenheim Fellowship and was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle Magazine. In 1950, she published her second book of poetry,Annie Allen, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize and Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize.

After President John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began a career of teaching creative writing. She taught at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin. In 1967, she attended a writer’s conference at Fisk University where, she said, she rediscovered her Blackness. This rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca, a book length poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago housing project. In The Mecca was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

Gwendolyn Brooks was made Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968. In 1985, Brooks became the Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry, a one year position whose title changed the next year to Poet Laureate. In 1988, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors for American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government. Other awards she received included the Frost Medal, the Shelley Memorial Award, and an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Brooks was awarded more than seventy-five honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide. In 1995, she was honored as the first Woman of the Year by the Harvard Black Men's Forum.

After a short battle with cancer, Gwendolyn Brooks died on Sunday, December 3, 2000, aged 83, at her Southside Chicago home with "pen in hand," and surrounded by verse and people she loved.