- Brooks, Gwendolyn Elizabeth
-
▪ 2001American writer (b. June 7, 1917, Topeka, Kan.—d. Dec. 3, 2000, Chicago, Ill.), was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and author who spoke of and to the everyday struggles and triumphs of African Americans during a distinguished literary career that spanned more than half a century. Her dedication to teaching was evidenced by a lifetime spent visiting young people in schools, holding public readings, and supporting community arts initiatives. Brooks, who grew up on Chicago's South Side, revealed a precocious talent for writing poetry; at age 11 she began submitting her work to local newspapers. During her teens she became a regular contributor to the Chicago Defender, at that time the most influential black newspaper in the U.S. After graduating (1936) from Woodrow Wilson Junior College (now Kennedy-King College) in Chicago, Brooks did clerical work until shortly after her marriage in 1939 to Henry Blakely, a fellow writer and poet. In 1945 Harper & Bros. (later Harper & Row and now HarperCollins) published her first volume of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, which chronicled black life on the South Side of Chicago. In 1946 she was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a $1,000 award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, recognitions that further established her reputation. When her second collection, Annie Allen (1949), was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Brooks became the first African American poet to receive this honour. In this work, Brooks told the story of a black girl coming of age in Chicago and introduced her own innovation in poetic form, the sonnet-ballad. The novel that followed, Maud Martha (1953), had a similar storyline, but it did not garner the praise that her poetry continued to elicit. Poems that appeared in The Bean Eaters (1960) and Selected Poems (1963) showed that Brooks's social consciousness had broadened beyond the South Side to include the injustices experienced by blacks everywhere in the U.S. Brooks began to lose her mainstream appeal as her poetic participation in the civil rights movement of the 1960s prompted her to leave her longtime publisher Harper & Row and move to the smaller, black-owned Broadside Press. Brooks was able, however, to achieve her goal of making her work more affordable and, by extension, more accessible. With Broadside and, later, with Third World Press, she published more than two dozen volumes of poetry and prose, including the autobiographical works Report from Part One (1972) and Report from Part Two (1996). Brooks succeeded Carl Sandburg as poet laureate of Illinois in 1968 and received lifetime achievement awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1989) and the National Book Foundation (1994). During her career, she was the recipient of more than 50 honorary degrees, but renown was never her aim. She simply wanted “to be clean of heart, clear of mind, and claiming of what is right and just.”
* * *
Universalium. 2010.