Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.

Throughout her prolific writing career, Brooks received many more honors. A lifelong resident of Chicago, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois in 1968, a position she held until her death 32 years later. She was also named the U.S. Poet Laureate for the 1985–86 term. In 1976, she became the first African-American woman inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Family lore held that Brooks' paternal grandfather had escaped slavery to join the Union forces during the American Civil War.

When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago during the Great Migration, and from then on, Chicago remained her home. She then attended a prestigious integrated high school in the city with a predominantly white student body, Hyde Park High School; transferred to the all-black Wendell Phillips High School; and finished her schooling at integrated Englewood High School.

Brooks began writing at an early age and her mother encouraged her, saying: "You are going to be the lady Paul Laurence Dunbar." During her teenage years, she began filling books with <nowiki>careful rhymes and </nowiki>lofty meditations", as well as submitting poems to various publications. She graduated in 1936 from a two-year program at Wilson Junior College, now known as Kennedy-King College, and at first worked as a typist to support herself while she pursued her career. In her early years, she received commendations on her poetic work and encouragement from James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright and Langston Hughes. James Weldon Johnson sent her the first critique of her poems when she was only 16 years old.

Brooks published her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), with Harper & Brothers, after a strong show of support to the publisher from author Richard Wright. Maud suffers prejudice and discrimination not only from white individuals but also from black individuals who have lighter skin tones than hers, something that is a direct reference to Brooks' personal experience. Eventually, Maud stands up for herself by turning her back on a patronizing and racist store clerk. "The book is ... about the triumph of the lowly," Shaw comments.

In 1967, the year of Langston Hughes's death, Brooks attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Nashville's Fisk University. Here, according to one version of events, she met activists and artists such as Imamu Amiri Baraka, Don L. Lee and others who exposed her to new black cultural nationalism. Recent studies argue that she had been involved in leftist politics in Chicago for many years and, under the pressures of McCarthyism, adopted a black nationalist posture as a means of distancing herself from her prior political connections. Brooks's experience at the conference inspired many of her subsequent literary activities. She taught creative writing to some of Chicago's Blackstone Rangers, otherwise a violent criminal gang. In 1968, she published one of her most famous works, In the Mecca, a long poem about a mother's search for her lost child in a Chicago apartment building. The poem was nominated for the National Book Award for poetry.

Following her publications with Harper, Brooks published titles beginning in the 1960s with independent Black-owned publishers: Broadside Press, Third World Press as well as her own small presses, Brooks Press and The David Company.

Her autobiographical Report From Part One, including reminiscences, interviews, photographs and vignettes, came out in 1972, and Report From Part Two was published in 1995, when she was almost 80. She was a contributor to the 1992 anthology Daughters of Africa, edited by Margaret Busby.

Teaching

Brooks said her first teaching experience was at the University of Chicago when she was invited by author Frank London Brown to teach a course in American literature. It was the beginning of her lifelong commitment to sharing poetry and teaching writing. Brooks's final student was poet Quraysh Ali Lansana, whom he says she served as a mentor to for many years.

Family life

In 1939, Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely Jr., whom she met after joining Chicago's NAACP Youth Council.

From mid-1961 to late 1964, Henry III served in the U.S. Marine Corps, first at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and then at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay. During this time, Brooks mentored her son's fiancée, Kathleen Hardiman, in writing poetry. Upon his return, Blakely and Hardiman married in 1965. Brooks had so enjoyed the mentoring relationship that she began to engage more frequently in that role with the new generation of young black poets.

Honors and legacy

Honors

1946, Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry.
1968, appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a position she held until her death in 2000
1973, Honorary consultant in American letters to the Library of Congress
1976, inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters
1979, Langston Hughes Medal
1980, appointed to Presidential Commission on the National Agenda for the Eighties.
1989, awarded the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement by the Poetry Society of America
1994, chosen to present the National Endowment for the Humanities' Jefferson Lecture.
1995, presented with the National Medal of Arts
1997, awarded the Order of Lincoln, the highest honor granted by the State of Illinois.
1999, awarded the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for distinguished poetic achievement

Legacy

First awarded in 1969 (for “Marigolds” by Eugenia Collier): Gwendolyn Brooks Prize for Fiction
1970: Gwendolyn Brooks Cultural Center, Western Illinois University, Macomb, Illinois
1990: Gwendolyn Brooks Center for Black Literature and Creative Writing, Chicago State University
1994: Furious Flower Poetry Center, the United States's first academic center for Black poetry, takes its name in honor of Brooks and her poem, “The Second Sermon on the Warpland” (1968)
1995: Gwendolyn Brooks Elementary School, Aurora, Illinois
2001: Gwendolyn Brooks College Preparatory Academy, Chicago, Illinois
2002: 100 Greatest African Americans
2002: Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School, Oak Park, Illinois
2003: Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library, Springfield, Illinois
2004: Hyacinth Park in Chicago was renamed Gwendolyn Brooks Park.
2010: Inducted into the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
2012: Honored on a United States' postage stamp.
2017: Various centennial events in Chicago marked what would have been her 100th birthday.
2017–18: "Our Miss Brooks @ 100" (OMB100) a celebration of the life of Brooks (born June 7, 1917), which ran through June 17, 2018. The opening ceremony on February 2, 2017, at the Art Institute of Chicago featured readings and discussions of Brooks' influence by Pulitzer Prize-winning poets Rita Dove, Yusef Komunyakaa, Gregory Pardlo, Tracy K. Smith, and Natasha Trethewey.
2018: On what would have been her 101st birthday, a statue of her, titled "Gwendolyn Brooks: The Oracle of Bronzeville", was unveiled at Gwendolyn Brooks Park in Chicago.
2021: Gwendolyn Brooks Memorial Park dedicated in Macomb, Illinois.
2022: Brooks was the subject of an exhibition, Gwendolyn Brooks: A Poet’s Work In Community, at the Morgan Library & Museum.

Works

The Poetry Foundation lists these works among others:

A Street in Bronzeville, Harper, 1945.
Annie Allen, Harper, 1949.
Maud Martha, Harper, 1953.
Bronzeville Boys and Girls, Harper, 1956.
The Bean Eaters, Harper, 1960.
We Real Cool, Brooks Press, 1960.
In the Mecca, Harper, 1968.
For Illinois 1968: A Sesquicentennial Poem, Harper, 1968.
Riot, Broadside Press, 1969.
Family Pictures, Broadside Press, 1970.
Aloneness, Broadside Press, 1971.
Report from Part One: An Autobiography, Broadside Press, 1972.
Black Love, Brooks Press, 1982.
Mayor Harold Washington; and, Chicago, the I Will City, Brooks Press, 1983.
The Near-Johannesburg Boy, and Other Poems, David Co., 1987.
Winnie, Third World Press, 1988.
Report from Part Two, Third World Press, 1996.
In Montgomery, and Other Poems, Third World Press, 2003.

Several collections of multiple works by Brooks were also published.