Gwendolyn Brooks

Gwendolyn Brooks was the first Black poet to win the Pulitzer Prize (1950) and the first Black woman to serve as Consultant in Poetry (Poet Laureate) to the Library of Congress. Brooks was also the Illinois poet laureate from 1968–2000. The author of more than twenty books, Brooks was thirteen when she published her first poem, “Eventide,” in American Childhood. Her first collection, A Street in Bronzeville, was published in 1945. Other collections include the Pulitzer Prize–winning Annie Allen (1949), In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1970), Aloneness (1971), Aurora (1972), and Beckonings (1975). Brooks’s only novel, Maud Martha (1953), details the prejudice its title character suffers from white people and from lighter-skinned African Americans, something that mirrored Brooks’s experience.

Brooks became an activist in the Black Power movement, and dedicated herself to mentoring generations of younger African American poets. Her work also includes an autobiography, Report from Part One (1972), and two collections of poetry that she edited: A Broadside Treasury (1971) and Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971). As poet laureate for both Illinois and the United States, Brooks took an active public role, using frequent visits to schools, prisons, colleges, hospitals, and drug rehabilitation centers to promote both the genre and younger poets. In 1995, Brooks received the National Medal of Arts.

The portrait of Gwendolyn Brooks is from the book, The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander. The volume is part of the American Poets Project published by Penguin Random House.