In the Spotlight: Gwendolyn Brooks

Born: June 7, 1917

Died: December 3, 2000

Was an award-winning African American woman poet

Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas on June 7, 1917, to Keziah Wims Brooks, a school teacher, and David Anderson Brooks, a janitor. However, when she was only six weeks old, her family moved to Chicago, Illinois where she grew up. Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered racial prejudice in her neighborhood and in her school. Her enthusiasm for reading and writing was encouraged by her parents, and she 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 75 published poems in 1933. Although she wrote a novel (Maud Martha, 1953) an autobiography, and some other prose works, she was noted primarily as a poet. By 1941, Brooks took part in poetry workshops and in 1943 she received an award for poetry from the Midwestern Writers' Conference. She then took her collection to Harper and Row to get them published. The editors put her collection of poems in A Street in Bronzeville. The recognition she received from this publication led to her 1949 book of poetry, Annie Allen, which received a Pulitzer Prize in 1950, the first won by an African American. In 1968, she was made Poet Laureate of Illinois. 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 75 honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide.

At the age of seventeen, Gwendolyn Brooks stuck to her roots and began submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the "Chicago Defender" an African American Newspaper. 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 1939. 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.

After her first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945, she received her first Guggenheim Fellowship, was one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in Mademoiselle magazine, and she was the first African-American that became a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The second book of poetry she published in 1949 was Annie Allen and won her Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize. In 1950 Brooks became the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize for poetry, which she received for Annie Allen. After John F. Kennedy invited her to read at a Library of Congress poetry festival in 1962, she began a college teaching career in 1963 to teach creative writing, which saw her teach at Columbia College Chicago, Northeastern Illinois University, Elmhurst College, Columbia University, Clay College of New York, and the University of Wisconsin. She was the 1985 Library of Congress's Consultant in Poetry, a one year position whose title changed the next year to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. In 1988 Gwendolyn Brooks was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. In 1994, she was chosen as the National Endowment for the Humanities's Jefferson Lecturer, one of the highest honors for American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.

On May 1, 1996, Brooks returned to her birthplace in Topeka, Kansas. She was the keynote speaker for the Third Annual Kaw Valley Girl Scout Council Women of Distinction Banquet and String of Pearls Auction. During her speech, she paid tribute to the Kaw Valley Girl Scout Council, Women of Distinction Bias Busters of Kansas, and to Cathy Henderson. Henderson was a former Missouri elementary school student 20 years ago. She wrote to the Topeka Chamber of Commerce for information about any monument here honoring Brooks. A ceremony was held for Brooks in her honor at a local park, located at 37th and Topeka Boulevard. In addition, Brooks was recognized by the National Endowment of Arts and received over seventy lifetime honorary awards. She was also acknowledged by the National Endowment for the Humanities with the highest government award of humanities.

Brooks also shared her view of the art of poetry, stating to create "bigness" you don't have to create an epic. "Bigness," said Brooks "can be found in a little haiku, five syllables, seven syllables."

Gwendolyn Brooks, age 83 died on Sunday December 3, 2000 at her Southside Chicago home with “pen in hand”, and surrounded by verse and people she loved. She was a poet who grew up in Chicago in the first half of the twentieth century and made history by becoming the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize. Brooks suffered a short illness before her death.


Legacy

In 2002, Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School in Oak Park, Illinois was renamed Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School.

In June 2003, the Illinois State Library in Springfield, Illinois was renamed the Gwendolyn Brooks Illinois State Library in honor of the late poet.


Works

Poetry except as noted.

A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
Annie Allen (1949)
Maud Martha (1953) (Fiction)
Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)
The Bean Eaters (1960)
Selected Poems (1963)
We Real Cool (1966)
In the Mecca (1968)
Family Pictures (1970)
Black Steel: Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali (1971)
The World of Gwendolyn Brooks (1971)
Aloneness (1971)
Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972) (Prose)
A Capsule Course in Black Poetry Writing (1975) (Prose)
Aurora (1972)
Beckonings (1975)
Black Love (1981)
To Disembark (1981)
Primer for Blacks (1981) (Prose)
Young Poet's Primer (1981) (Prose)
Very Young Poets (1983) (Prose)
The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986)
Blacks (1987)
Winnie (1988)
Children Coming Home (1991)
In Montgomery (2000)


Quotationa
(provided by BrainyQuotes)

"Art hurts. Art urges voyages - and it is easier to stay at home."

"The '40s and '50s were years of high poetincense; the language-flowers were thickly sweet. Those flowers whined and begged white folks to pick them, to find them lovable. Then the '60s: Independent fire!"

"Poetry is life distilled."

"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."

"Very early in life I became fascinated with the wonders language can achieve. And I began playing with words."

"What I'm fighting for now in my work... for an expression relevant to all manner of blacks, poems I could take into a tavern, into the street, into the halls of a housing project."


Poetry
(provided by poetryfoundation.org)

A Sunset of the City

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.


It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.


It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.


It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.


Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.


Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.




my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell


I hold my honey and I store my bread
In little jars and cabinets of my will.
I label clearly, and each latch and lid
I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.
I am very hungry. I am incomplete.
And none can tell when I may dine again.
No man can give me any word but Wait,
The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;
Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt
Drag out to their last dregs and I resume
On such legs as are left me, in such heart
As I can manage, remember to go home,
My taste will not have turned insensitive
To honey and bread old purity could love.