Gwendolyn Brooks

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Gwendolyn Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an American poet, writer, and educator.

Her work frequently dealt with personal celebrations and community members.

Brooks was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, making her the first African American to be honoured with the Pulitzer Prize during her prolific writing career.

In 1968, she was appointed Poet Laureate of Illinois, a post she held until her death, and she now Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress for the 1985–86 term.

Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, and when she reached Chicago, where she stayed the rest of her life.

Her parents, especially her mother, encouraged her poetry writing.

As a child, she began submitting poems to various journals.

After graduating high school amid the Great Depression, she began a two-year junior college degree, served as a typewriter, married, and had children.

She discovered significant markets for her poetry as she continues to write and publish her work.

Because of her work, she has also moved to lecturing and teaching aspiring writers.

Several colleges and universities have been honoured in her honor for her writing as the winner of multiple awards for her writing.

Early life

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in Topeka, Kansas, and raised on Chicago's South Side. She was David Anderson Brooks and Keziah (Wims) Brooks' first child. Her father, a janitor for a music business, had hoped to work as a doctor but had to get married and raise a family. Her mother was both a school teacher and a concert pianist trained in classical music. Brooks' mother had attended the Topeka school that later became involved in the notorious Brown vs. Board of Education racial discrimination lawsuit. During the American Civil War, Brooks' paternal grandfather had left slavery to join the Union forces, according to a family lore.

When Brooks was six weeks old, her family immigrated to Chicago during the Great Migration, and Chicago remained her home from then on. For the remainder of her life, she will closely identify with Chicago.

In a 1994 interview, she remarked:

She began formal education at Forestville Elementary School on Chicago's South Side. Brooks attended a selective integrated high school in the city with mainly white student body, Hyde Park High School; migrated to the all-black Wendell Phillips High School; and concluded her training at integrated Englewood High School.

According to biographer Kenny Jackson Williams, Brooks faced significant racial injustice in connection with the cultural transitions in which she attended them. This experience, not just in her own environment but also in every relevant American mindset, helped her recognize the mistrust and mistrust in current systems and dominant organizations.

Brooks began writing at an early age, and her mother encouraged her by saying, "You are going to be the Lady Paul Laurence Dunbar." She began filling books with "careful rhymes" and "lofty meditations" as well as submitting poems to numerous publications throughout her teen years. When she was 13 years old, her first poem was published in American Childhood. She was already a regular contributor to The Chicago Defender by the time she graduated from high school in 1935.

Brooks did not pursue a four-year college degree because she knew she wanted to be a writer but felt it was unnecessary. "I am not a scholar," she later said. "I'm just a writer who loves to write and will always write." She graduated from Wilson Junior College, now known as Kennedy-King College, in 1936, and spent time as a typist to support herself as she pursued her career.

Family life

Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr., who was first introduced to the NAACP Youth Council in 1939. They had two children, Henry Lowington Blakely III and Nora Brooks Blakely. In 1996, Brooks' husband died.

Henry III served in the United States Marine Corps from mid-1961 to late 1964, first at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego and then at Marine Corps Air Station Kaneohe Bay. Brooks mentored her son's fiancée, Kathleen Hardiman, in writing poetry during this period. Blakely and Hardiman married in 1965 after his return to work. Brooks continued to enjoy the mentoring relationship that she began to participate more often in the role with the new generation of young black poets.

On December 3, 2000, Gwendolyn Brooks died at her Chicago home at the age of 83. She is buried in Lincoln Cemetery.

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Career

In a children's magazine, American Childhood, Brooks wrote her first poem, "Eventide," when she was 13 years old. She had already written and published approximately 75 poems by the age of 16. She began submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows," the Chicago Defender's poetry column, an African-American newspaper, in December 17. Many of her poems were published before she attended Wilson Junior College, ranging from traditional ballads and sonnets to poems in free verse using blues rhythms. She received accolades from James Weldon Johnson, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes in her early years. When she was just sixteen years old, James Weldon Johnson gave her the first critique of her poems.

Brooks' characters were often drawn from her inner city life, which she intimately understood. "I lived in a tiny second-story apartment on the corner, and I could see first on one side and then the other." "My stuff was mine."

Brooks was participating in poetry workshops by 1941. Inez Cunningham Stark, an affluent white woman with a strong literary history, curated a particularly useful one. At the new South Side Community Art Center, where Brooks attended, Stark held writing workshops. It was here she found her voice and a greater understanding of her predecessors' methods. Langston Hughes, a retired poet, stopped by the workshop and heard her read "The Ballad of Pearl May Lee." She fulfilled a dream she had been pursuing since she was 14 years old in 1944 by submitting unprompted submissions: two of her poems were included in Poetry magazine's November issue. She referred to her job as a "housewife" in the autobiographical information she provided to the magazine.

After a strong showing of support from author Richard Wright, Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), with Harper & Brothers, she released A Street in Bronzeville (1945). It consists of a series of poems relating to an African American girl's growing up in Chicago. Wright explained to the editors who asked for his opinion about Brooks' work: "Itymist" is a word that has been criticized by the editors:

In Bronzeville, the book received immediate praise for its authentic and textured life portraits. "Initiated My Reputation," Brooks later said in the Chicago Tribune that it was a glowing review by Paul Engle. Brooks' poems, according to Engle, were no more "Negro poetry" than Robert Frost's "white poetry." Brooks earned her first Guggenheim Fellowship in 1946 and was named as one of the "Ten Young Women of the Year" in Mademoiselle magazine.

Annie Allen (1949), Brooks' second book of poetry, focused on a young Black girl growing into womanhood in Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood. The book was also named a winner of the Poetry magazine's Eunice Tietjens Prize in 1950.

Brooks' first and only narrative book, Maud Martha, is a collection of 34 vignettes about black women's coming of age, which is consistent with her earlier books' themes. Maud Martha Brown, a black woman, chronicles her transition from childhood to adulthood as she moves from childhood to adulthood. It tells the tale of "a woman with doubts about herself and how she fits in the culture." Maud's complaint is not so much that she is inferior, but that she is perceived as ugly." In his book Gwendolyn Brooks, states author Harry B. Shaw writes about her beauty. Maud suffers prejudice and discrimination not only from white people, but also from black people with darker skin tones than hers, something that is a direct reference to Brooks' personal experience. Maud stands up for herself by refusing to work with a patronizing and racial grocery clerk. Shaw writes, "The book is... about the triumph of the lowly." In comparison, literary scholar Mary Helen Washington emphasizes Brooks' rejection of bigotry and misogyny, calling Maud Martha "a book about resentment, passion, self-hatred, and a sarcastic silence" that comes from suppressed outrage.

Brooks attended the Second Black Writers' Conference at Fisk University in 1967, the year of Langston Hughes' death. Here's a look at what happened. Imamu Amiri Baraka, Don L. Lee, and others who introduced her to new black cultural nationalism, according to one version of events. According to new reports, she had been active in leftist politics in Chicago for many years and, under McCarthyism's strains, adopted a black nationalist role as a way of distanced herself from her prior political positions. Brooks' participation in the conference sparked a number of her later literary pursuits. She taught creative writing to some of Chicago's Blackstone Rangers, who were otherwise a violent criminal group. In 1968, she published In the Mecca, a long poem about a mother's hunt for her missing child in a Chicago apartment building. The poem was selected for the National Book Award for Poetry.

Her autobiographical Report From Part One, which contained reminiscences, interviews, photographs, and vignettes, came out in 1972, and Report From Part Two was published in 1995, when she was almost 80. Her other books include Primer for Blacks (1980), Young Poet's Primer (1980), and Other Poems (1986), Winnie (1991), and Children's Come Home (1991).

When author Frank London Brown invited her to teach a course in American literature, Brooks said it was her first teaching experience at the University of Chicago. It was the start of her lifelong dedication to teaching poetry and teaching writing. Brooks taught extensively around the country and held positions at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Chicago State University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Columbia University, and the City College of New York.

The University of Illinois' Rare Book & Manuscript Library acquired Brooks' archives from her daughter Nora Blakely. In addition, the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley has a collection of her personal papers, mainly from 1950 to 1989.

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