Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks 1917-2000, American poet, b. Topeka, Kans. She grew up in the slums of Chicago and lived in that city until her death. Brooks's poems, technically accomplished and written in a variety of forms including quatrains, free verse, ballads, and sonnets, deal with the experience of being black and often of being female in America. She attracted critical attention with her first volume, A Street in Bronzeville (1945). Brooks went on to win the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Annie Allen (1949), becoming the first black woman to win this award. Her verse was collected in The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1970), which also includes an earlier novelette, Maud Martha (1953). Her work took on a more radical tone beginning with In the Mecca (1968); the subsequent poems in Riot (1970) are written in street dialects. Her other writings include Primer for Blacks (1980) and To Disembark (1981).

Bibliography: See her autobiographies, Report from Part One (1972) and Report from Part Two (1995).

Brooks, Gwendolyn (1917–2000), poet reared in Chicago's slums, whose works include A Street in Bronzeville (1945), lyrics; Annie Allen (1949, Pulitzer Prize), a verse narrative about a black girl's life to maturity in World War II, treating her race's isolation as both spiritual and social; The Bean Eaters (1960), about contemporary black life in the U.S.; and Selected Poems (1963). Later volumes of poetry, more militant in tone but continuing to treat the lives and problems of blacks, include In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), and To Disembark (1982). Maud Martha (1953), a novelette about a black woman's romance, is set in Chicago; Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956) is a book for children; and Report from Part One (1972) and Report from Part Two (1998) collected autobiographical pieces. She was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress (1985–86), becoming the first African‐American woman named to that post.