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Gwendolyn Brooks
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks (June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000) was an . She was appointed Poet Laureate of in 1968 and in 1985.
Biography
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was born on June 7, 1917, in , the first child of David Anderson Brooks and Keziah Wims. Her mother was a former school teacher who had chosen that field because she could not afford to attend . (Family lore held that her paternal grandfather had escaped to join forces during the .) When Brooks was six weeks old, her family moved to during the ; from then on, Chicago was her hometown. She went by the nickname "Gwendie" among her close friends.
Her home life was stable and loving, although she encountered in her neighborhood and in schools. She attended , the leading high school in the city, before transferring to the all-black . Brooks eventually attended an , . In 1936 she graduated from Wilson Junior College. These four schools gave her a perspective on racial dynamics in the city that continued to influence her work.
Career
Brooks published her first poem in a children's magazine at the age of thirteen. By the time she was sixteen, she had compiled a portfolio of around 75 published poems. At seventeen, she started submitting her work to "Lights and Shadows", the poetry column of the , an African-American newspaper. Her poems, many published while she attended Wilson Junior College, ranged in style from traditional and to poems using rhythms in . Her characters were often drawn from the poor of the . After failing to obtain a position with the Chicago Defender, Brooks took a series of secretarial jobs.
By 1941, Brooks was taking part in poetry workshops. A particularly influential one was organized by Inez Cunningham Stark, an affluent white woman with a strong literary background. The group dynamic of Stark's workshop, all of whose participants were African American, energized Brooks. Her poetry began to be taken seriously.. In 1943 she received an award for poetry from the Midwestern Writers' Conference.
Brooks' first book of poetry, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), published by , earned instant critical acclaim. She received her first and was included as one of the “Ten Young Women of the Year” in magazine. With her second book of poetry, Annie Allen (1950), she became the first African American to win the for poetry; she also was awarded Poetry magazine’s Eunice Tietjens Prize.
After President invited Brooks to read at a poetry festival in 1962, she began a second career teaching creative writing. She taught at , , Chicago State University, , , , and the . In 1967 she attended a writers’ conference at where, she said, she rediscovered her blackness.[] This rediscovery is reflected in her work In The Mecca (1968), a long poem about a mother searching for her lost child in a Chicago . In The Mecca was nominated for the for poetry.
On May 1, 1996 Brooks returned to her birthplace of . She was invited as the keynote speaker for the Third Annual Kaw Valley Girl Scout Council's "Women of Distinction Banquet and String of Pearls Auction." A ceremony was held in her honor at a local park at 37th and Topeka Boulevard.
Personal
In 1939 Brooks married Henry Lowington Blakely, Jr. They had two children: Henry Lowington Blakely III, born October 10, 1940; and Nora Blakely, born in 1951.
From mid-1961 to late-1964, Henry III served in the , first at and then at . During this time, Brooks mentored his fiancee, , today known as anthropologist Kathleen Rand Reed, 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.
Brooks died at age 83 on December 3, 2000, at her home on Chicago's South Side. She is buried at in , Illinois.
Excerpt
Born in Alabama / Bred in Illinois. / He was nothing but a / Plain black boy.” “Swing low swing low sweet sweet chariot. / Nothing but a plain black boy
Excerpted from a much longer poem, "Of De Witt Williams on His Way to Lincoln Cemetery," (1946) about the joyful, anonymous, seedy, short life of a Chicago resident going to his grave through the streets of Bronzeville.
Honors and legacy
· 1968, appointed of .
· 1985, selected as the Consultant in Poetry to the , an honorary one-year position whose title was renamed the next year to .
· 1988, inducted into the .
· 1994, chosen as the ' , one of the highest honors in American literature and the highest award in the humanities given by the federal government.
· 1995, presented with the .
· 1995, honored as the first Woman of the Year chosen by the Harvard Black Men's Forum.
Other awards she received included the , the , and an award from the . Brooks also received more than seventy-five honorary degrees from colleges and universities worldwide.
Bibliography
· Negro Hero (1945)
· The Mother (1945)
· A Street in Bronzeville (1945)
· (1950)
· Maud Martha (1953) (Fiction)
· Bronzeville Boys and Girls (1956)
· The Bean Eaters (1960)
· Selected Poems (1963)
· (1966)
· In the Mecca (1968)
· Malcolm X (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)
The Blackstone Rangers
By 1917–2000 Gwendolyn Brooks
I
AS SEEN BY DISCIPLINES
There they are.
Thirty at the corner.
Black, raw, ready.
Sores in the city
that do not want to heal.
II
THE LEADERS
Jeff. Gene. Geronimo. And Bop.
They cancel, cure and curry.
Hardly the dupes of the downtown thing
the cold bonbon,
the rhinestone thing. And hardly
in a hurry.
Hardly Belafonte, King,
Black Jesus, Stokely, Malcolm X or Rap.
Bungled trophies.
Their country is a Nation on no map.
Jeff, Gene, Geronimo and Bop
in the passionate noon,
in bewitching night
are the detailed men, the copious men.
They curry, cure,
they cancel, cancelled images whose Concerts
are not divine, vivacious; the different tins ...
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